180 research outputs found
Deep Learning for Environmentally Robust Speech Recognition: An Overview of Recent Developments
Eliminating the negative effect of non-stationary environmental noise is a
long-standing research topic for automatic speech recognition that stills
remains an important challenge. Data-driven supervised approaches, including
ones based on deep neural networks, have recently emerged as potential
alternatives to traditional unsupervised approaches and with sufficient
training, can alleviate the shortcomings of the unsupervised methods in various
real-life acoustic environments. In this light, we review recently developed,
representative deep learning approaches for tackling non-stationary additive
and convolutional degradation of speech with the aim of providing guidelines
for those involved in the development of environmentally robust speech
recognition systems. We separately discuss single- and multi-channel techniques
developed for the front-end and back-end of speech recognition systems, as well
as joint front-end and back-end training frameworks
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 Four-Stage Data Augmentation Approach to ResNet-Conformer Based Acoustic Modeling for Sound Event Localization and Detection
In this paper, we propose a novel four-stage data augmentation approach to
ResNet-Conformer based acoustic modeling for sound event localization and
detection (SELD). First, we explore two spatial augmentation techniques, namely
audio channel swapping (ACS) and multi-channel simulation (MCS), to deal with
data sparsity in SELD. ACS and MDS focus on augmenting the limited training
data with expanding direction of arrival (DOA) representations such that the
acoustic models trained with the augmented data are robust to localization
variations of acoustic sources. Next, time-domain mixing (TDM) and
time-frequency masking (TFM) are also investigated to deal with overlapping
sound events and data diversity. Finally, ACS, MCS, TDM and TFM are combined in
a step-by-step manner to form an effective four-stage data augmentation scheme.
Tested on the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events
(DCASE) 2020 data sets, our proposed augmentation approach greatly improves the
system performance, ranking our submitted system in the first place in the SELD
task of DCASE 2020 Challenge. Furthermore, we employ a ResNet-Conformer
architecture to model both global and local context dependencies of an audio
sequence to yield further gains over those architectures used in the DCASE 2020
SELD evaluations.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure
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