8,594 research outputs found
Robust sound event detection in bioacoustic sensor networks
Bioacoustic sensors, sometimes known as autonomous recording units (ARUs),
can record sounds of wildlife over long periods of time in scalable and
minimally invasive ways. Deriving per-species abundance estimates from these
sensors requires detection, classification, and quantification of animal
vocalizations as individual acoustic events. Yet, variability in ambient noise,
both over time and across sensors, hinders the reliability of current automated
systems for sound event detection (SED), such as convolutional neural networks
(CNN) in the time-frequency domain. In this article, we develop, benchmark, and
combine several machine listening techniques to improve the generalizability of
SED models across heterogeneous acoustic environments. As a case study, we
consider the problem of detecting avian flight calls from a ten-hour recording
of nocturnal bird migration, recorded by a network of six ARUs in the presence
of heterogeneous background noise. Starting from a CNN yielding
state-of-the-art accuracy on this task, we introduce two noise adaptation
techniques, respectively integrating short-term (60 milliseconds) and long-term
(30 minutes) context. First, we apply per-channel energy normalization (PCEN)
in the time-frequency domain, which applies short-term automatic gain control
to every subband in the mel-frequency spectrogram. Secondly, we replace the
last dense layer in the network by a context-adaptive neural network (CA-NN)
layer. Combining them yields state-of-the-art results that are unmatched by
artificial data augmentation alone. We release a pre-trained version of our
best performing system under the name of BirdVoxDetect, a ready-to-use detector
of avian flight calls in field recordings.Comment: 32 pages, in English. Submitted to PLOS ONE journal in February 2019;
revised August 2019; published October 201
Crossmodal Attentive Skill Learner
This paper presents the Crossmodal Attentive Skill Learner (CASL), integrated
with the recently-introduced Asynchronous Advantage Option-Critic (A2OC)
architecture [Harb et al., 2017] to enable hierarchical reinforcement learning
across multiple sensory inputs. We provide concrete examples where the approach
not only improves performance in a single task, but accelerates transfer to new
tasks. We demonstrate the attention mechanism anticipates and identifies useful
latent features, while filtering irrelevant sensor modalities during execution.
We modify the Arcade Learning Environment [Bellemare et al., 2013] to support
audio queries, and conduct evaluations of crossmodal learning in the Atari 2600
game Amidar. Finally, building on the recent work of Babaeizadeh et al. [2017],
we open-source a fast hybrid CPU-GPU implementation of CASL.Comment: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
(AAMAS) 2018, NIPS 2017 Deep Reinforcement Learning Symposiu
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