29,507 research outputs found
Acoustic Scene Classification by Implicitly Identifying Distinct Sound Events
In this paper, we propose a new strategy for acoustic scene classification
(ASC) , namely recognizing acoustic scenes through identifying distinct sound
events. This differs from existing strategies, which focus on characterizing
global acoustical distributions of audio or the temporal evolution of
short-term audio features, without analysis down to the level of sound events.
To identify distinct sound events for each scene, we formulate ASC in a
multi-instance learning (MIL) framework, where each audio recording is mapped
into a bag-of-instances representation. Here, instances can be seen as
high-level representations for sound events inside a scene. We also propose a
MIL neural networks model, which implicitly identifies distinct instances
(i.e., sound events). Furthermore, we propose two specially designed modules
that model the multi-temporal scale and multi-modal natures of the sound events
respectively. The experiments were conducted on the official development set of
the DCASE2018 Task1 Subtask B, and our best-performing model improves over the
official baseline by 9.4% (68.3% vs 58.9%) in terms of classification accuracy.
This study indicates that recognizing acoustic scenes by identifying distinct
sound events is effective and paves the way for future studies that combine
this strategy with previous ones.Comment: code URL typo, code is available at
https://github.com/hackerekcah/distinct-events-asc.gi
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
Knowledge Transfer from Weakly Labeled Audio using Convolutional Neural Network for Sound Events and Scenes
In this work we propose approaches to effectively transfer knowledge from
weakly labeled web audio data. We first describe a convolutional neural network
(CNN) based framework for sound event detection and classification using weakly
labeled audio data. Our model trains efficiently from audios of variable
lengths; hence, it is well suited for transfer learning. We then propose
methods to learn representations using this model which can be effectively used
for solving the target task. We study both transductive and inductive transfer
learning tasks, showing the effectiveness of our methods for both domain and
task adaptation. We show that the learned representations using the proposed
CNN model generalizes well enough to reach human level accuracy on ESC-50 sound
events dataset and set state of art results on this dataset. We further use
them for acoustic scene classification task and once again show that our
proposed approaches suit well for this task as well. We also show that our
methods are helpful in capturing semantic meanings and relations as well.
Moreover, in this process we also set state-of-art results on Audioset dataset,
relying on balanced training set.Comment: ICASSP 201
Listening for Sirens: Locating and Classifying Acoustic Alarms in City Scenes
This paper is about alerting acoustic event detection and sound source
localisation in an urban scenario. Specifically, we are interested in spotting
the presence of horns, and sirens of emergency vehicles. In order to obtain a
reliable system able to operate robustly despite the presence of traffic noise,
which can be copious, unstructured and unpredictable, we propose to treat the
spectrograms of incoming stereo signals as images, and apply semantic
segmentation, based on a Unet architecture, to extract the target sound from
the background noise. In a multi-task learning scheme, together with signal
denoising, we perform acoustic event classification to identify the nature of
the alerting sound. Lastly, we use the denoised signals to localise the
acoustic source on the horizon plane, by regressing the direction of arrival of
the sound through a CNN architecture. Our experimental evaluation shows an
average classification rate of 94%, and a median absolute error on the
localisation of 7.5{\deg} when operating on audio frames of 0.5s, and of
2.5{\deg} when operating on frames of 2.5s. The system offers excellent
performance in particularly challenging scenarios, where the noise level is
remarkably high.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure
A target guided subband filter for acoustic event detection in noisy environments using wavelet packets
This paper deals with acoustic event detection (AED), such as screams, gunshots, and explosions, in noisy environments. The main aim is to improve the detection performance under adverse conditions with a very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A novel filtering method combined with an energy detector is presented. The wavelet packet transform (WPT) is first used for time-frequency representation of the acoustic signals. The proposed filter in the wavelet packet domain then uses a priori knowledge of the target event and an estimate of noise features to selectively suppress the background noise. It is in fact a content-aware band-pass filter which can automatically pass the frequency bands that are more significant in the target than in the noise. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed filtering method is capable of enhancing the target content while suppressing the background noise for signals with a low SNR. A condition to increase the probability of correct detection is also obtained. Experiments have been carried out on a large dataset of acoustic events that are contaminated by different types of environmental noise and white noise with varying SNRs. Results show that the proposed method is more robust and better adapted to noise than ordinary energy detectors, and it can work even with an SNR as low as -15 dB. A practical system for real time processing and multi-target detection is also proposed in this work
Self-Supervised Vision-Based Detection of the Active Speaker as Support for Socially-Aware Language Acquisition
This paper presents a self-supervised method for visual detection of the
active speaker in a multi-person spoken interaction scenario. Active speaker
detection is a fundamental prerequisite for any artificial cognitive system
attempting to acquire language in social settings. The proposed method is
intended to complement the acoustic detection of the active speaker, thus
improving the system robustness in noisy conditions. The method can detect an
arbitrary number of possibly overlapping active speakers based exclusively on
visual information about their face. Furthermore, the method does not rely on
external annotations, thus complying with cognitive development. Instead, the
method uses information from the auditory modality to support learning in the
visual domain. This paper reports an extensive evaluation of the proposed
method using a large multi-person face-to-face interaction dataset. The results
show good performance in a speaker dependent setting. However, in a speaker
independent setting the proposed method yields a significantly lower
performance. We believe that the proposed method represents an essential
component of any artificial cognitive system or robotic platform engaging in
social interactions.Comment: 10 pages, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental System
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