1,108 research outputs found
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
Learning sound representations using trainable COPE feature extractors
Sound analysis research has mainly been focused on speech and music
processing. The deployed methodologies are not suitable for analysis of sounds
with varying background noise, in many cases with very low signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR). In this paper, we present a method for the detection of patterns
of interest in audio signals. We propose novel trainable feature extractors,
which we call COPE (Combination of Peaks of Energy). The structure of a COPE
feature extractor is determined using a single prototype sound pattern in an
automatic configuration process, which is a type of representation learning. We
construct a set of COPE feature extractors, configured on a number of training
patterns. Then we take their responses to build feature vectors that we use in
combination with a classifier to detect and classify patterns of interest in
audio signals. We carried out experiments on four public data sets: MIVIA audio
events, MIVIA road events, ESC-10 and TU Dortmund data sets. The results that
we achieved (recognition rate equal to 91.71% on the MIVIA audio events, 94% on
the MIVIA road events, 81.25% on the ESC-10 and 94.27% on the TU Dortmund)
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and are higher than the
ones obtained by other existing approaches. The COPE feature extractors have
high robustness to variations of SNR. Real-time performance is achieved even
when the value of a large number of features is computed.Comment: Accepted for publication in Pattern Recognitio
Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing
Given the recent surge in developments of deep learning, this article
provides a review of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for audio
signal processing. Speech, music, and environmental sound processing are
considered side-by-side, in order to point out similarities and differences
between the domains, highlighting general methods, problems, key references,
and potential for cross-fertilization between areas. The dominant feature
representations (in particular, log-mel spectra and raw waveform) and deep
learning models are reviewed, including convolutional neural networks, variants
of the long short-term memory architecture, as well as more audio-specific
neural network models. Subsequently, prominent deep learning application areas
are covered, i.e. audio recognition (automatic speech recognition, music
information retrieval, environmental sound detection, localization and
tracking) and synthesis and transformation (source separation, audio
enhancement, generative models for speech, sound, and music synthesis).
Finally, key issues and future questions regarding deep learning applied to
audio signal processing are identified.Comment: 15 pages, 2 pdf figure
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Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events
For intelligent systems to make best use of the audio modality, it is important that they can recognize not just speech and music, which have been researched as specific tasks, but also general sounds in everyday environments. To stimulate research in this field we conducted a public research challenge: the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE). In this paper, we report on the state of the art in automatically classifying audio scenes, and automatically detecting and classifying audio events. We survey prior work as well as the state of the art represented by the submissions to the challenge from various research groups. We also provide detail on the organization of the challenge, so that our experience as challenge hosts may be useful to those organizing challenges in similar domains. We created new audio datasets and baseline systems for the challenge; these, as well as some submitted systems, are publicly available under open licenses, to serve as benchmarks for further research in general-purpose machine listening
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