Multi-Temporal Resolution Convolutional Neural Networks for Acoustic Scene Classification

In this paper we present a Deep Neural Network architecture for the task of acoustic scene classification which harnesses information from increasing temporal resolutions of Mel-Spectrogram segments. This architecture is composed of separated parallel Convolutional Neural Networks which learn spectral and temporal representations for each input resolution. The resolutions are chosen to cover fine-grained characteristics of a scene's spectral texture as well as its distribution of acoustic events. The proposed model shows a 3.56% absolute improvement of the best performing single resolution model and 12.49% of the DCASE 2017 Acoustic Scenes Classification task baseline.Comment: In Proceedings of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 2017 Workshop (DCASE2017), November 201

CNNs-based Acoustic Scene Classification using Multi-Spectrogram Fusion and Label Expansions

Spectrograms have been widely used in Convolutional Neural Networks based schemes for acoustic scene classification, such as the STFT spectrogram and the MFCC spectrogram, etc. They have different time-frequency characteristics, contributing to their own advantages and disadvantages in recognizing acoustic scenes. In this letter, a novel multi-spectrogram fusion framework is proposed, making the spectrograms complement each other. In the framework, a single CNN architecture is applied onto multiple spectrograms for feature extraction. The deep features extracted from multiple spectrograms are then fused to discriminate the acoustic scenes. Moreover, motivated by the inter-class similarities in acoustic scene datasets, a label expansion method is further proposed in which super-class labels are constructed upon the original classes. On the help of the expanded labels, the CNN models are transformed into the multitask learning form to improve the acoustic scene classification by appending the auxiliary task of super-class classification. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods, intensive experiments have been performed on the DCASE2017 and the LITIS Rouen datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve promising accuracies on both datasets. Specifically, accuracies of 0.9744, 0.8865 and 0.7778 are obtained for the LITIS Rouen dataset, the DCASE Development set and Evaluation set respectively

Deep Within-Class Covariance Analysis for Robust Audio Representation Learning

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can learn effective features, though have been shown to suffer from a performance drop when the distribution of the data changes from training to test data. In this paper we analyze the internal representations of CNNs and observe that the representations of unseen data in each class, spread more (with higher variance) in the embedding space of the CNN compared to representations of the training data. More importantly, this difference is more extreme if the unseen data comes from a shifted distribution. Based on this observation, we objectively evaluate the degree of representation's variance in each class via eigenvalue decomposition on the within-class covariance of the internal representations of CNNs and observe the same behaviour. This can be problematic as larger variances might lead to mis-classification if the sample crosses the decision boundary of its class. We apply nearest neighbor classification on the representations and empirically show that the embeddings with the high variance actually have significantly worse KNN classification performances, although this could not be foreseen from their end-to-end classification results. To tackle this problem, we propose Deep Within-Class Covariance Analysis (DWCCA), a deep neural network layer that significantly reduces the within-class covariance of a DNN's representation, improving performance on unseen test data from a shifted distribution. We empirically evaluate DWCCA on two datasets for Acoustic Scene Classification (DCASE2016 and DCASE2017). We demonstrate that not only does DWCCA significantly improve the network's internal representation, it also increases the end-to-end classification accuracy, especially when the test set exhibits a distribution shift. By adding DWCCA to a VGG network, we achieve around 6 percentage points improvement in the case of a distribution mismatch.Comment: 11 pages, 3 tables, 4 figure

ACGAN-based Data Augmentation Integrated with Long-term Scalogram for Acoustic Scene Classification

In acoustic scene classification (ASC), acoustic features play a crucial role in the extraction of scene information, which can be stored over different time scales. Moreover, the limited size of the dataset may lead to a biased model with a poor performance for records from unseen cities and confusing scene classes. In order to overcome this, we propose a long-term wavelet feature that requires a lower storage capacity and can be classified faster and more accurately compared with classic Mel filter bank coefficients (FBank). This feature can be extracted with predefined wavelet scales similar to the FBank. Furthermore, a novel data augmentation scheme based on generative adversarial neural networks with auxiliary classifiers (ACGANs) is adopted to improve the generalization of the ASC systems. The scheme, which contains ACGANs and a sample filter, extends the database iteratively by splitting the dataset, training the ACGANs and subsequently filtering samples. Experiments were conducted on datasets from the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) challenges. The results on the DCASE19 dataset demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed techniques compared with the classic FBank classifier. Moreover, the proposed fusion system achieved first place in the DCASE19 competition and surpassed the top accuracies on the DCASE17 dataset

Acoustic scene classification using convolutional neural network and multiple-width frequency-delta data augmentation

In recent years, neural network approaches have shown superior performance to conventional hand-made features in numerous application areas. In particular, convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) exploit spatially local correlations across input data to improve the performance of audio processing tasks, such as speech recognition, musical chord recognition, and onset detection. Here we apply ConvNet to acoustic scene classification, and show that the error rate can be further decreased by using delta features in the frequency domain. We propose a multiple-width frequency-delta (MWFD) data augmentation method that uses static mel-spectrogram and frequency-delta features as individual input examples. In addition, we describe a ConvNet output aggregation method designed for MWFD augmentation, folded mean aggregation, which combines output probabilities of static and MWFD features from the same analysis window using multiplication first, rather than taking an average of all output probabilities. We describe calculation results using the DCASE 2016 challenge dataset, which shows that ConvNet outperforms both of the baseline system with hand-crafted features and a deep neural network approach by around 7%. The performance was further improved (by 5.7%) using the MWFD augmentation together with folded mean aggregation. The system exhibited a classification accuracy of 0.831 when classifying 15 acoustic scenes.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing on 08-July-201

Environmental Sound Classification Based on Multi-temporal Resolution Convolutional Neural Network Combining with Multi-level Features

Motivated by the fact that characteristics of different sound classes are highly diverse in different temporal scales and hierarchical levels, a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed for the environmental sound classification task. This network architecture takes raw waveforms as input, and a set of separated parallel CNNs are utilized with different convolutional filter sizes and strides, in order to learn feature representations with multi-temporal resolutions. On the other hand, the proposed architecture also aggregates hierarchical features from multi-level CNN layers for classification using direct connections between convolutional layers, which is beyond the typical single-level CNN features employed by the majority of previous studies. This network architecture also improves the flow of information and avoids vanishing gradient problem. The combination of multi-level features boosts the classification performance significantly. Comparative experiments are conducted on two datasets: the environmental sound classification dataset (ESC-50), and DCASE 2017 audio scene classification dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed method is highly effective in the classification tasks by employing multi-temporal resolution and multi-level features, and it outperforms the previous methods which only account for single-level features.Comment: Submit to PCM 201

Sample Dropout for Audio Scene Classification Using Multi-Scale Dense Connected Convolutional Neural Network

Acoustic scene classification is an intricate problem for a machine. As an emerging field of research, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) achieve convincing results. In this paper, we explore the use of multi-scale Dense connected convolutional neural network (DenseNet) for the classification task, with the goal to improve the classification performance as multi-scale features can be extracted from the time-frequency representation of the audio signal. On the other hand, most of previous CNN-based audio scene classification approaches aim to improve the classification accuracy, by employing different regularization techniques, such as the dropout of hidden units and data augmentation, to reduce overfitting. It is widely known that outliers in the training set have a high negative influence on the trained model, and culling the outliers may improve the classification performance, while it is often under-explored in previous studies. In this paper, inspired by the silence removal in the speech signal processing, a novel sample dropout approach is proposed, which aims to remove outliers in the training dataset. Using the DCASE 2017 audio scene classification datasets, the experimental results demonstrates the proposed multi-scale DenseNet providing a superior performance than the traditional single-scale DenseNet, while the sample dropout method can further improve the classification robustness of multi-scale DenseNet.Comment: Accepted to 2018 Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop (PKAW

Acoustic Features Fusion using Attentive Multi-channel Deep Architecture

In this paper, we present a novel deep fusion architecture for audio classification tasks. The multi-channel model presented is formed using deep convolution layers where different acoustic features are passed through each channel. To enable dissemination of information across the channels, we introduce attention feature maps that aid in the alignment of frames. The output of each channel is merged using interaction parameters that non-linearly aggregate the representative features. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture on three benchmark datasets:- DCASE-2016 and LITIS Rouen (acoustic scene recognition), and CHiME-Home (tagging). Our experimental results suggest that the architecture presented outperforms the standard baselines and achieves outstanding performance on the task of acoustic scene recognition and audio tagging.Comment: Accepted in CHiME'18 (Interspeech Workshop

Ensemble Of Deep Neural Networks For Acoustic Scene Classification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently achieved great success in a multitude of classification tasks. Ensembles of DNNs have been shown to improve the performance. In this paper, we explore the recent state-of-the-art DNNs used for image classification. We modified these DNNs and applied them to the task of acoustic scene classification. We conducted a number of experiments on the TUT Acoustic Scenes 2017 dataset to empirically compare these methods. Finally, we show that the best model improves the baseline score for DCASE-2017 Task 1 by 3.1% in the test set and by 10% in the development set.Comment: Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 201

A Comparison of deep learning methods for environmental sound

Environmental sound detection is a challenging application of machine learning because of the noisy nature of the signal, and the small amount of (labeled) data that is typically available. This work thus presents a comparison of several state-of-the-art Deep Learning models on the IEEE challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2016 challenge task and data, classifying sounds into one of fifteen common indoor and outdoor acoustic scenes, such as bus, cafe, car, city center, forest path, library, train, etc. In total, 13 hours of stereo audio recordings are available, making this one of the largest datasets available. We perform experiments on six sets of features, including standard Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), Binaural MFCC, log Mel-spectrum and two different large- scale temporal pooling features extracted using OpenSMILE. On these features, we apply five models: Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Deep Neural Network (DNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Convolutional Deep Neural Net- work (CNN) and i-vector. Using the late-fusion approach, we improve the performance of the baseline 72.5% by 15.6% in 4-fold Cross Validation (CV) avg. accuracy and 11% in test accuracy, which matches the best result of the DCASE 2016 challenge. With large feature sets, deep neural network models out- perform traditional methods and achieve the best performance among all the studied methods. Consistent with other work, the best performing single model is the non-temporal DNN model, which we take as evidence that sounds in the DCASE challenge do not exhibit strong temporal dynamics.Comment: 5 pages including referenc