A toolbox for animal call recognition

Monitoring the natural environment is increasingly important as habit degradation and climate change reduce theworld’s biodiversity.We have developed software tools and applications to assist ecologists with the collection and analysis of acoustic data at large spatial and temporal scales.One of our key objectives is automated animal call recognition, and our approach has three novel attributes. First, we work with raw environmental audio, contaminated by noise and artefacts and containing calls that vary greatly in volume depending on the animal’s proximity to the microphone. Second, initial experimentation suggested that no single recognizer could dealwith the enormous variety of calls. Therefore, we developed a toolbox of generic recognizers to extract invariant features for each call type. Third, many species are cryptic and offer little data with which to train a recognizer. Many popular machine learning methods require large volumes of training and validation data and considerable time and expertise to prepare. Consequently we adopt bootstrap techniques that can be initiated with little data and refined subsequently. In this paper, we describe our recognition tools and present results for real ecological problems

Audio-Visual Learning for Scene Understanding

Multimodal deep learning aims at combining the complementary information of different modalities. Among all modalities, audio and video are the predominant ones that humans use to explore the world. In this thesis, we decided to focus our study on audio-visual deep learning to mimic with our networks how humans perceive the world. Our research includes images, audio signals and acoustic images. The latter provide spatial audio information and are obtained from a planar array of microphones combining their raw audios with the beamforming algorithm. They better mimic human auditory systems, which cannot be replicated using just one microphone, not able alone to give spatial sound cues. However, as microphones arrays are not so widespread, we also study how to handle the missing spatialized audio modality at test time. As a solution, we propose to distill acoustic images content to audio features during the training in order to handle their absence at test time. This is done for supervised audio classification using the generalized distillation framework, which we also extend for self-supervised learning. Next, we devise a method for reconstructing acoustic images given a single microphone and an RGB frame. Therefore, in case we just dispose of a standard video, we are able to synthesize spatial audio, which is useful for many audio-visual tasks, including sound localization. Lastly, as another example of restoring one modality from available ones, we inpaint degraded images providing audio features, to reconstruct the missing region not only to be visually plausible but also semantically consistent with the related sound. This includes also cross-modal generation, in the limit case of completely missing or hidden visual modality: our method naturally deals with it, being able to generate images from sound. In summary we show how audio can help visual learning and vice versa, by transferring knowledge between the two modalities at training time, in order to distill, reconstruct, or restore the missing modality at test time

A study on different linear and non-linear filtering techniques of speech and speech recognition

In any signal noise is an undesired quantity, however most of thetime every signal get mixed with noise at different levels of theirprocessing and application, due to which the information containedby the signal gets distorted and makes the whole signal redundant.A speech signal is very prominent with acoustical noises like bubblenoise, car noise, street noise etc. So for removing the noises researchershave developed various techniques which are called filtering. Basicallyall the filtering techniques are not suitable for every application,hence based on the type of application some techniques are betterthan the others. Broadly, the filtering techniques can be classifiedinto two categories i.e. linear filtering and non-linear filtering.In this paper a study is presented on some of the filtering techniqueswhich are based on linear and nonlinear approaches. These techniquesincludes different adaptive filtering based on algorithm like LMS,NLMS and RLS etc., Kalman filter, ARMA and NARMA time series applicationfor filtering, neural networks combine with fuzzy i.e. ANFIS. Thispaper also includes the application of various features i.e. MFCC,LPC, PLP and gamma for filtering and recognition

Advances in Sonar Technology

The demand to explore the largest and also one of the richest parts of our planet, the advances in signal processing promoted by an exponential growth in computation power and a thorough study of sound propagation in the underwater realm, have lead to remarkable advances in sonar technology in the last years.The work on hand is a sum of knowledge of several authors who contributed in various aspects of sonar technology. This book intends to give a broad overview of the advances in sonar technology of the last years that resulted from the research effort of the authors in both sonar systems and their applications. It is intended for scientist and engineers from a variety of backgrounds and even those that never had contact with sonar technology before will find an easy introduction with the topics and principles exposed here

음향 이벤트 탐지를 위한 효율적 데이터 활용 및 약한 교사학습 기법

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부,2020. 2. 김남수.Conventional audio event detection (AED) models are based on supervised approaches. For supervised approaches, strongly labeled data is required. However, collecting large-scale strongly labeled data of audio events is challenging due to the diversity of audio event types and labeling difficulties. In this thesis, we propose data-efficient and weakly supervised techniques for AED. In the first approach, a data-efficient AED system is proposed. In the proposed system, data augmentation is performed to deal with the data sparsity problem and generate polyphonic event examples. An exemplar-based noise reduction algorithm is proposed for feature enhancement. For polyphonic event detection, a multi-labeled deep neural network (DNN) classifier is employed. An adaptive thresholding algorithm is applied as a post-processing method for robust event detection in noisy conditions. From the experimental results, the proposed algorithm has shown promising performance for AED on a low-resource dataset. In the second approach, a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based audio tagging system is proposed. The proposed model consists of a local detector and a global classifier. The local detector detects local audio words that contain distinct characteristics of events, and the global classifier summarizes the information to predict audio events on the recording. From the experimental results, we have found that the proposed model outperforms conventional artificial neural network models. In the final approach, we propose a weakly supervised AED model. The proposed model takes advantage of strengthening feature propagation from DenseNet and modeling channel-wise relationships by SENet. Also, the correlations among segments in audio recordings are represented by a recurrent neural network (RNN) and conditional random field (CRF). RNN utilizes contextual information and CRF post-processing helps to refine segment-level predictions. We evaluate our proposed method and compare its performance with a CNN based baseline approach. From a number of experiments, it has been shown that the proposed method is effective both on audio tagging and weakly supervised AED.일반적인 음향 이벤트 탐지 시스템은 교사학습을 통해 훈련된다. 교사학습을 위해서는 강한 레이블 데이터가 요구된다. 하지만 강한 레이블 데이터는 음향 이벤트의 다양성 및 레이블의 난이도로 인해 큰 데이터베이스를 구축하기 어렵다는 문제가 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위해 음향 이벤트 탐지를 위한 데이터 효율적 활용 및 약한 교사학습 기법에 대해 제안한다. 첫 번째 접근법으로서, 데이터 효율적인 음향 이벤트 탐지 시스템을 제안한다. 제안된 시스템에서는 데이터 증대 기법을 사용해 데이터 희소성 문제에 대응하고 중첩 이벤트 데이터를 생성하였다. 특징 벡터 향상을 위해 잡음 억제 기법이 사용되었고 중첩 음향 이벤트 탐지를 위해 다중 레이블 심층 인공신경망(DNN) 분류기가 사용되었다. 실험 결과, 제안된 알고리즘은 불충분한 데이터에서도 우수한 음향 이벤트 탐지 성능을 나타내었다. 두 번째 접근법으로서, 컨볼루션 신경망(CNN) 기반 오디오 태깅 시스템을 제안한다. 제안된 모델은 로컬 검출기와 글로벌 분류기로 구성된다. 로컬 검출기는 고유한 음향 이벤트 특성을 포함하는 로컬 오디오 단어를 감지하고 글로벌 분류기는 탐지된 정보를 요약하여 오디오 이벤트를 예측한다. 실험 결과, 제안된 모델이 기존 인공신경망 기법보다 우수한 성능을 나타내었다. 마지막 접근법으로서, 약한 교사학습 음향 이벤트 탐지 모델을 제안한다. 제안된 모델은 DenseNet의 구조를 활용하여 정보의 원활한 흐름을 가능하게 하고 SENet을 활용해 채널간의 상관관계를 모델링 한다. 또한, 오디오 신호에서 부분 간의 상관관계 정보를 재순환 신경망(RNN) 및 조건부 무작위 필드(CRF)를 사용해 활용하였다. 여러 실험을 통해 제안된 모델이 기존 CNN 기반 기법보다 오디오 태깅 및 음향 이벤트 탐지 모두에서 더 나은 성능을 나타냄을 보였다.1 Introduction 1 2 Audio Event Detection 5 2.1 Data-Ecient Audio Event Detection 6 2.2 Audio Tagging 7 2.3 Weakly Supervised Audio Event Detection 9 2.4 Metrics 10 3 Data-Ecient Techniques for Audio Event Detection 17 3.1 Introduction 17 3.2 DNN-Based AED system 18 3.2.1 Data Augmentation 20 3.2.2 Exemplar-Based Approach for Noise Reduction 21 3.2.3 DNN Classier 22 3.2.4 Post-Processing 23 3.3 Experiments 24 3.4 Summary 27 4 Audio Tagging using Local Detector and Global Classier 29 4.1 Introduction 29 4.2 CNN-Based Audio Tagging Model 31 4.2.1 Local Detector and Global Classier 32 4.2.2 Temporal Localization of Events 34 4.3 Experiments 34 4.3.1 Dataset and Feature 34 4.3.2 Model Training 35 4.3.3 Results 36 4.4 Summary 39 5 Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Structured Prediction for Weakly Supervised Audio Event Detection 41 5.1 Introduction 41 5.2 CNN with Structured Prediction for Weakly Supervised AED 46 5.2.1 DenseNet 47 5.2.2 Squeeze-and-Excitation 48 5.2.3 Global Pooling for Aggregation 49 5.2.4 Structured Prediction for Accurate Event Localization 50 5.3 Experiments 53 5.3.1 Dataset 53 5.3.2 Feature Extraction 54 5.3.3 DSNet and DSNet-RNN Structures 54 5.3.4 Baseline CNN Structure 56 5.3.5 Training and Evaluation 57 5.3.6 Metrics 57 5.3.7 Results and Discussion 58 5.3.8 Comparison with the DCASE 2017 task 4 Results 61 5.4 Summary 62 6 Conclusions 65 Bibliography 67 요 약 77 감사의 글 79Docto

Contextual Beamforming: Exploiting Location and AI for Enhanced Wireless Telecommunication Performance

The pervasive nature of wireless telecommunication has made it the foundation for mainstream technologies like automation, smart vehicles, virtual reality, and unmanned aerial vehicles. As these technologies experience widespread adoption in our daily lives, ensuring the reliable performance of cellular networks in mobile scenarios has become a paramount challenge. Beamforming, an integral component of modern mobile networks, enables spatial selectivity and improves network quality. However, many beamforming techniques are iterative, introducing unwanted latency to the system. In recent times, there has been a growing interest in leveraging mobile users' location information to expedite beamforming processes. This paper explores the concept of contextual beamforming, discussing its advantages, disadvantages and implications. Notably, the study presents an impressive 53% improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by implementing the adaptive beamforming (MRT) algorithm compared to scenarios without beamforming. It further elucidates how MRT contributes to contextual beamforming. The importance of localization in implementing contextual beamforming is also examined. Additionally, the paper delves into the use of artificial intelligence schemes, including machine learning and deep learning, in implementing contextual beamforming techniques that leverage user location information. Based on the comprehensive review, the results suggest that the combination of MRT and Zero forcing (ZF) techniques, alongside deep neural networks (DNN) employing Bayesian Optimization (BO), represents the most promising approach for contextual beamforming. Furthermore, the study discusses the future potential of programmable switches, such as Tofino, in enabling location-aware beamforming

Imaging Sensors and Applications

In past decades, various sensor technologies have been used in all areas of our lives, thus improving our quality of life. In particular, imaging sensors have been widely applied in the development of various imaging approaches such as optical imaging, ultrasound imaging, X-ray imaging, and nuclear imaging, and contributed to achieve high sensitivity, miniaturization, and real-time imaging. These advanced image sensing technologies play an important role not only in the medical field but also in the industrial field. This Special Issue covers broad topics on imaging sensors and applications. The scope range of imaging sensors can be extended to novel imaging sensors and diverse imaging systems, including hardware and software advancements. Additionally, biomedical and nondestructive sensing applications are welcome

Artificial Intelligence for Multimedia Signal Processing

Artificial intelligence technologies are also actively applied to broadcasting and multimedia processing technologies. A lot of research has been conducted in a wide variety of fields, such as content creation, transmission, and security, and these attempts have been made in the past two to three years to improve image, video, speech, and other data compression efficiency in areas related to MPEG media processing technology. Additionally, technologies such as media creation, processing, editing, and creating scenarios are very important areas of research in multimedia processing and engineering. This book contains a collection of some topics broadly across advanced computational intelligence algorithms and technologies for emerging multimedia signal processing as: Computer vision field, speech/sound/text processing, and content analysis/information mining

Influence of Auditory Cues on the Neuronal Response to Naturalistic Visual Stimuli in a Virtual Reality Setting

Virtual reality environments offer great opportunities to study the performance of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in real-world contexts. As real-world stimuli are typically multimodal, their neuronal integration elicits complex response patterns. To investigate the effect of additional auditory cues on the processing of visual information, we used virtual reality to mimic safety-related events in an industrial environment while we concomitantly recorded electroencephalography (EEG) signals. We simulated a box traveling on a conveyor belt system where two types of stimuli – an exploding and a burning box – interrupt regular operation. The recordings from 16 subjects were divided into two subsets, a visual-only and an audio-visual experiment. In the visual-only experiment, the response patterns for both stimuli elicited a similar pattern – a visual evoked potential (VEP) followed by an event-related potential (ERP) over the occipital-parietal lobe. Moreover, we found the perceived severity of the event to be reflected in the signal amplitude. Interestingly, the additional auditory cues had a twofold effect on the previous findings: The P1 component was significantly suppressed in the case of the exploding box stimulus, whereas the N2c showed an enhancement for the burning box stimulus. This result highlights the impact of multisensory integration on the performance of realistic BCI applications. Indeed, we observed alterations in the offline classification accuracy for a detection task based on a mixed feature extraction (variance, power spectral density, and discrete wavelet transform) and a support vector machine classifier. In the case of the explosion, the accuracy slightly decreased by –1.64% p. in an audio-visual experiment compared to the visual-only. Contrarily, the classification accuracy for the burning box increased by 5.58% p. when additional auditory cues were present. Hence, we conclude, that especially in challenging detection tasks, it is favorable to consider the potential of multisensory integration when BCIs are supposed to operate under (multimodal) real-world conditions