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

Federated Self-Supervised Learning of Multi-Sensor Representations for Embedded Intelligence

Smartphones, wearables, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices produce a wealth of data that cannot be accumulated in a centralized repository for learning supervised models due to privacy, bandwidth limitations, and the prohibitive cost of annotations. Federated learning provides a compelling framework for learning models from decentralized data, but conventionally, it assumes the availability of labeled samples, whereas on-device data are generally either unlabeled or cannot be annotated readily through user interaction. To address these issues, we propose a self-supervised approach termed \textit{scalogram-signal correspondence learning} based on wavelet transform to learn useful representations from unlabeled sensor inputs, such as electroencephalography, blood volume pulse, accelerometer, and WiFi channel state information. Our auxiliary task requires a deep temporal neural network to determine if a given pair of a signal and its complementary viewpoint (i.e., a scalogram generated with a wavelet transform) align with each other or not through optimizing a contrastive objective. We extensively assess the quality of learned features with our multi-view strategy on diverse public datasets, achieving strong performance in all domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of representations learned from an unlabeled input collection on downstream tasks with training a linear classifier over pretrained network, usefulness in low-data regime, transfer learning, and cross-validation. Our methodology achieves competitive performance with fully-supervised networks, and it outperforms pre-training with autoencoders in both central and federated contexts. Notably, it improves the generalization in a semi-supervised setting as it reduces the volume of labeled data required through leveraging self-supervised learning.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Internet of Things Journa

Attention-based atrous convolutional neural networks: visualisation and understanding perspectives of acoustic scenes

The goal of Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) is to recognise the environment in which an audio waveform has been recorded. Recently, deep neural networks have been applied to ASC and have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, few works have investigated how to visualise and understand what a neural network has learnt from acoustic scenes. Previous work applied local pooling after each convolutional layer, therefore reduced the size of the feature maps. In this paper, we suggest that local pooling is not necessary, but the size of the receptive field is important. We apply atrous Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with global attention pooling as the classification model. The internal feature maps of the attention model can be visualised and explained. On the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2018 dataset, our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 72.7 %, significantly outperforming the CNNs without dilation at 60.4 %. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that the learnt feature maps contain rich information on acoustic scenes in the time-frequency domain

Deep learning techniques for computer audition

Automatically recognising audio signals plays a crucial role in the development of intelligent computer audition systems. Particularly, audio signal classification, which aims to predict a label for an audio wave, has promoted many real-life applications. Amounts of efforts have been made to develop effective audio signal classification systems in the real world. However, several challenges in deep learning techniques for audio signal classification remain to be addressed. For instance, training a deep neural network (DNN) from scratch is time-consuming to extracting high-level deep representations. Furthermore, DNNs have not been well explained to construct the trust between humans and machines, and facilitate developing realistic intelligent systems. Moreover, most DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, resulting in many misclassifications. To deal with these challenges, this thesis proposes and presents a set of deep-learning-based approaches for audio signal classification. In particular, to tackle the challenge of extracting high-level deep representations, the transfer learning frameworks, benefiting from pre-trained models on large-scale image datasets, are introduced to produce effective deep spectrum representations. Furthermore, the attention mechanisms at both the frame level and the time-frequency level are proposed to explain the DNNs by respectively estimating the contributions of each frame and each time-frequency bin to the predictions. Likewise, the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with an attention mechanism at the time-frequency level is extended to atrous CNNs with attention, aiming to explain the CNNs by visualising high-resolution attention tensors. Additionally, to interpret the CNNs evaluated on multi-device datasets, the atrous CNNs with attention are trained in the conditional training frameworks. Moreover, to improve the robustness of the DNNs against adversarial attacks, models are trained in the adversarial training frameworks. Besides, the transferability of adversarial attacks is enhanced by a lifelong learning framework. Finally, the experiments conducted with various datasets demonstrate that these presented approaches are effective to address the challenges