Speech Emotion Recognition using Supervised Deep Recurrent System for Mental Health Monitoring

Understanding human behavior and monitoring mental health are essential to maintaining the community and society's safety. As there has been an increase in mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic due to uncontrolled mental health, early detection of mental issues is crucial. Nowadays, the usage of Intelligent Virtual Personal Assistants (IVA) has increased worldwide. Individuals use their voices to control these devices to fulfill requests and acquire different services. This paper proposes a novel deep learning model based on the gated recurrent neural network and convolution neural network to understand human emotion from speech to improve their IVA services and monitor their mental health.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted in the IEEE WFIoT202

Dual Quaternion Ambisonics Array for Six-Degree-of-Freedom Acoustic Representation

Spatial audio methods are gaining a growing interest due to the spread of immersive audio experiences and applications, such as virtual and augmented reality. For these purposes, 3D audio signals are often acquired through arrays of Ambisonics microphones, each comprising four capsules that decompose the sound field in spherical harmonics. In this paper, we propose a dual quaternion representation of the spatial sound field acquired through an array of two First Order Ambisonics (FOA) microphones. The audio signals are encapsulated in a dual quaternion that leverages quaternion algebra properties to exploit correlations among them. This augmented representation with 6 degrees of freedom (6DOF) involves a more accurate coverage of the sound field, resulting in a more precise sound localization and a more immersive audio experience. We evaluate our approach on a sound event localization and detection (SELD) benchmark. We show that our dual quaternion SELD model with temporal convolution blocks (DualQSELD-TCN) achieves better results with respect to real and quaternion-valued baselines thanks to our augmented representation of the sound field. Full code is available at: https://github.com/ispamm/DualQSELD-TCN.Comment: Paper under consideration at Elsevier Pattern Recognition Letter

Delayed Memory Unit: Modelling Temporal Dependency Through Delay Gate

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are renowned for their adeptness in modeling temporal dependencies, a trait that has driven their widespread adoption for sequential data processing. Nevertheless, vanilla RNNs are confronted with the well-known issue of gradient vanishing and exploding, posing a significant challenge for learning and establishing long-range dependencies. Additionally, gated RNNs tend to be over-parameterized, resulting in poor network generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Delayed Memory Unit (DMU) in this paper, wherein a delay line structure, coupled with delay gates, is introduced to facilitate temporal interaction and temporal credit assignment, so as to enhance the temporal modeling capabilities of vanilla RNNs. Particularly, the DMU is designed to directly distribute the input information to the optimal time instant in the future, rather than aggregating and redistributing it over time through intricate network dynamics. Our proposed DMU demonstrates superior temporal modeling capabilities across a broad range of sequential modeling tasks, utilizing considerably fewer parameters than other state-of-the-art gated RNN models in applications such as speech recognition, radar gesture recognition, ECG waveform segmentation, and permuted sequential image classification

Compact recurrent neural networks for acoustic event detection on low-energy low-complexity platforms

Outdoor acoustic events detection is an exciting research field but challenged by the need for complex algorithms and deep learning techniques, typically requiring many computational, memory, and energy resources. This challenge discourages IoT implementation, where an efficient use of resources is required. However, current embedded technologies and microcontrollers have increased their capabilities without penalizing energy efficiency. This paper addresses the application of sound event detection at the edge, by optimizing deep learning techniques on resource-constrained embedded platforms for the IoT. The contribution is two-fold: firstly, a two-stage student-teacher approach is presented to make state-of-the-art neural networks for sound event detection fit on current microcontrollers; secondly, we test our approach on an ARM Cortex M4, particularly focusing on issues related to 8-bits quantization. Our embedded implementation can achieve 68% accuracy in recognition on Urbansound8k, not far from state-of-the-art performance, with an inference time of 125 ms for each second of the audio stream, and power consumption of 5.5 mW in just 34.3 kB of RAM

Speaker verification using attentive multi-scale convolutional recurrent network

In this paper, we propose a speaker verification method by an Attentive Multi-scale Convolutional Recurrent Network (AMCRN). The proposed AMCRN can acquire both local spatial information and global sequential information from the input speech recordings. In the proposed method, logarithm Mel spectrum is extracted from each speech recording and then fed to the proposed AMCRN for learning speaker embedding. Afterwards, the learned speaker embedding is fed to the back-end classifier (such as cosine similarity metric) for scoring in the testing stage. The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art methods for speaker verification. Experimental data are three public datasets that are selected from two large-scale speech corpora (VoxCeleb1 and VoxCeleb2). Experimental results show that our method exceeds baseline methods in terms of equal error rate and minimal detection cost function, and has advantages over most of baseline methods in terms of computational complexity and memory requirement. In addition, our method generalizes well across truncated speech segments with different durations, and the speaker embedding learned by the proposed AMCRN has stronger generalization ability across two back-end classifiers.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables. Accepted for publication in Applied Soft Computin