In this work, we propose an approach that features deep feature embedding learning and hierarchical classification with triplet loss function for Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC). In the one hand, a deep convolutional neural network is firstly trained to learn a feature embedding from scene audio signals. Via the trained convolutional neural network, the learned embedding embeds an input into the embedding feature space and transforms it into a high-level feature vector for representation. In the other hand, in order to exploit the structure of the scene categories, the original scene classification problem is structured into a hierarchy where similar categories are grouped into meta-categories. Then, hierarchical classification is accomplished using deep neural network classifiers associated with triplet loss function. Our experiments show that the proposed system achieves good performance on both the DCASE 2018 Task 1A and 1B datasets, resulting in accuracy gains of 15.6% and 16.6% absolute over the DCASE 2018 baseline on Task 1A and 1B, respectively.
Ghent University（根特大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Most existing deep learning-based acoustic scene classification (ASC) approaches directly utilize representations extracted from spectrograms to identify target scenes. However, these approaches pay little attention to the audio events occurring in the scene despite they provide crucial semantic information. This paper conducts the first study that investigates whether real-life acoustic scenes can be reliably recognized based only on the features that describe a limited number of audio events. To model the task-specific relationships between coarse-grained acoustic scenes and fine-grained aud…
Devices capable of detecting and categorizing acoustic scenes have numerous applications such as providing context-aware user experiences. In this paper, we address the task of characterizing acoustic scenes in a workplace setting from audio recordings collected with wearable microphones. The acoustic scenes, tracked with Bluetooth transceivers, vary dynamically with time from the egocentric perspective of a mobile user. Our dataset contains experience sampled long audio recordings collected from clinical providers in a hospital, who wore the audio badges during multiple work shifts. To handle…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Sound scene geotagging is a new topic of research which has evolved from acoustic scene classification. It is motivated by the idea of audio surveillance. Not content with only describing a scene in a recording, a machine which can locate where the recording was captured would be of use to many. In this paper we explore a series of common audio data augmentation methods to evaluate which best improves the accuracy of audio geotagging classifiers. Our work improves on the state-of-the-art city geotagging method by 23% in terms of classification accuracy.
In real life, acoustic scenes and audio events are naturally correlated. Humans instinctively rely on fine-grained audio events as well as the overall sound characteristics to distinguish diverse acoustic scenes. Yet, most previous approaches treat acoustic scene classification (ASC) and audio event classification (AEC) as two independent tasks. A few studies on scene and event joint classification either use synthetic audio datasets that hardly match the real world, or simply use the multi-task framework to perform two tasks at the same time. Neither of these two ways makes full use of the im…
The deployment of machine listening algorithms in real-life applications is often impeded by a domain shift caused for instance by different microphone characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel domain adaptation strategy based on disentanglement learning. The goal is to disentangle task-specific and domain-specific characteristics in the analyzed audio recordings. In particular, we combine two strategies: First, we apply different binary masks to internal embedding representations and, second, we suggest a novel combination of categorical cross-entropy and variance-based losses. Our r…
Source separation is the task to separate an audio recording into individual sound sources. Source separation is fundamental for computational auditory scene analysis. Previous work on source separation has focused on separating particular sound classes such as speech and music. Many of previous work require mixture and clean source pairs for training. In this work, we propose a source separation framework trained with weakly labelled data. Weakly labelled data only contains the tags of an audio clip, without the occurrence time of sound events. We first train a sound event detection system wi…
In this work we propose approaches to effectively transfer knowledge from weakly labeled web audio data. We first describe a convolutional neural network (CNN) based framework for sound event detection and classification using weakly labeled audio data. Our model trains efficiently from audios of variable lengths; hence, it is well suited for transfer learning. We then propose methods to learn representations using this model which can be effectively used for solving the target task. We study both transductive and inductive transfer learning tasks, showing the effectiveness of our methods for …
We seek to develop simultaneous segmentation and classification of notes from audio recordings in presence of outliers. The selected architecture for modeling time series is hierarchical linear dynamical system (HLDS). We propose a novel method for its parameter setting. HLDS can potentially be employed in two ways: 1) simultaneous segmentation and clustering for exploring data, i.e. finding unknown notes, 2) simultaneous segmentation and classification of audio recording for finding the notes of interest in the presence of outliers. We adapted HLDS for the second purpose since it is an easier…
One of the problems with automated audio captioning (AAC) is the indeterminacy in word selection corresponding to the audio event/scene. Since one acoustic event/scene can be described with several words, it results in a combinatorial explosion of possible captions and difficulty in training. To solve this problem, we propose a Transformer-based audio-captioning model with keyword estimation called TRACKE. It simultaneously solves the word-selection indeterminacy problem with the main task of AAC while executing the sub-task of acoustic event detection/acoustic scene classification (i.e., keyw…
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Yonsei University（延世大学）
How does audio describe the world around us? In this paper, we propose a method for generating an image of a scene from sound. Our method addresses the challenges of dealing with the large gaps that often exist between sight and sound. We design a model that works by scheduling the learning procedure of each model component to associate audio-visual modalities despite their information gaps. The key idea is to enrich the audio features with visual information by learning to align audio to visual latent space. We translate the input audio to visual features, then use a pre-trained generator to …
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；International Audio Laboratories（国际音频实验室）
Previous DCASE challenges contributed to an increase in the performance of acoustic scene classification systems. State-of-the-art classifiers demand significant processing capabilities and memory which is challenging for resource-constrained mobile or IoT edge devices. Thus, it is more likely to deploy these models on more powerful hardware and classify audio recordings previously uploaded (or streamed) from low-power edge devices. In such scenario, the edge device may apply perceptual audio coding to reduce the transmission data rate. This paper explores the effect of perceptual audio coding…
Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）；Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）
In this paper, we present an acoustic scene classification framework based on a large-margin factorized convolutional neural network (CNN). We adopt the factorized CNN to learn the patterns in the time-frequency domain by factorizing the 2D kernel into two separate 1D kernels. The factorized kernel leads to learn the main component of two patterns: the long-term ambient and short-term event sounds which are the key patterns of the audio scene classification. In training our model, we consider the loss function based on the triplet sampling such that the same audio scene samples from different …
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动公司）
Audio classification is an important task of mapping audio samples into their corresponding labels. Recently, the transformer model with self-attention mechanisms has been adopted in this field. However, existing audio transformers require large GPU memories and long training time, meanwhile relying on pretrained vision models to achieve high performance, which limits the model's scalability in audio tasks. To combat these problems, we introduce HTS-AT: an audio transformer with a hierarchical structure to reduce the model size and training time. It is further combined with a token-semantic mo…
Acoustic scene classification (ASC) is one of the most popular problems in the field of machine listening. The objective of this problem is to classify an audio clip into one of the predefined scenes using only the audio data. This problem has considerably progressed over the years in the different editions of DCASE. It usually has several subtasks that allow to tackle this problem with different approaches. The subtask presented in this report corresponds to a ASC problem that is constrained by the complexity of the model as well as having audio recorded from different devices, known as misma…
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Pattern recognition from audio signals is an active research topic encompassing audio tagging, acoustic scene classification, music classification, and other areas. Spectrogram and mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are among the most commonly used features for audio signal analysis and classification. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been successfully used for audio classification problems using spectrogram-based 2D features. In this paper, we present SpectNet, an integrated front-end layer that extracts spectrogram features within a CNN architecture that can be…
Acoustic scene classification is the task of identifying the scene from which the audio signal is recorded. Convolutional neural network (CNN) models are widely adopted with proven successes in acoustic scene classification. However, there is little insight on how an audio scene is perceived in CNN, as what have been demonstrated in image recognition research. In the present study, the Class Activation Mapping (CAM) is utilized to analyze how the log-magnitude Mel-scale filter-bank (log-Mel) features of different acoustic scenes are learned in a CNN classifier. It is noted that distinct high-e…
Distribution mismatches between the data seen at training and at application time remain a major challenge in all application areas of machine learning. We study this problem in the context of machine listening (Task 1b of the DCASE 2019 Challenge). We propose a novel approach to learn domain-invariant classifiers in an end-to-end fashion by enforcing equal hidden layer representations for domain-parallel samples, i.e. time-aligned recordings from different recording devices. No classification labels are needed for our domain adaptation (DA) method, which makes the data collection process chea…
University of Kent（肯特大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Acoustic scenes are rich and redundant in their content. In this work, we present a spatio-temporal attention pooling layer coupled with a convolutional recurrent neural network to learn from patterns that are discriminative while suppressing those that are irrelevant for acoustic scene classification. The convolutional layers in this network learn invariant features from time-frequency input. The bidirectional recurrent layers are then able to encode the temporal dynamics of the resulting convolutional features. Afterwards, a two-dimensional attention mask is formed via the outer product of t…
In this paper, we present a deep neural network (DNN)-based acoustic scene classification framework. Two hierarchical learning methods are proposed to improve the DNN baseline performance by incorporating the hierarchical taxonomy information of environmental sounds. Firstly, the parameters of the DNN are initialized by the proposed hierarchical pre-training. Multi-level objective function is then adopted to add more constraint on the cross-entropy based loss function. A series of experiments were conducted on the Task1 of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) …
In this paper, we present deep learning frameworks for audio-visual scene classification (SC) and indicate how individual visual and audio features as well as their combination affect SC performance. Our extensive experiments, which are conducted on DCASE (IEEE AASP Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events) Task 1B development dataset, achieve the best classification accuracy of 82.2%, 91.1%, and 93.9% with audio input only, visual input only, and both audio-visual input, respectively. The highest classification accuracy of 93.9%, obtained from an ensemble of aud…
This paper introduces a curated dataset of urban scenes for audio-visual scene analysis which consists of carefully selected and recorded material. The data was recorded in multiple European cities, using the same equipment, in multiple locations for each scene, and is openly available. We also present a case study for audio-visual scene recognition and show that joint modeling of audio and visual modalities brings significant performance gain compared to state of the art uni-modal systems. Our approach obtained an 84.8% accuracy compared to 75.8% for the audio-only and 68.4% for the video-onl…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）
Audio-based multimedia retrieval tasks may identify semantic information in audio streams, i.e., audio concepts (such as music, laughter, or a revving engine). Conventional Gaussian-Mixture-Models have had some success in classifying a reduced set of audio concepts. However, multi-class classification can benefit from context window analysis and the discriminating power of deeper architectures. Although deep learning has shown promise in various applications such as speech and object recognition, it has not yet met the expectations for other fields such as audio concept classification. This pa…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
Reflective and textureless surfaces such as windows, mirrors, and walls can be a challenge for object and scene reconstruction. These surfaces are often poorly reconstructed and filled with depth discontinuities and holes, making it difficult to cohesively reconstruct scenes that contain these planar discontinuities. We propose Echoreconstruction, an audio-visual method that uses the reflections of sound to aid in geometry and audio reconstruction for virtual conferencing, teleimmersion, and other AR/VR experience. The mobile phone prototype emits pulsed audio, while recording video for RGB-ba…
This paper presents the details of the Audio-Visual Scene Classification task in the DCASE 2021 Challenge (Task 1 Subtask B). The task is concerned with classification using audio and video modalities, using a dataset of synchronized recordings. This task has attracted 43 submissions from 13 different teams around the world. Among all submissions, more than half of the submitted systems have better performance than the baseline. The common techniques among the top systems are the usage of large pretrained models such as ResNet or EfficientNet which are trained for the task-specific problem. Fi…
SceneFake: An Initial Dataset and Benchmarks for Scene Fake Audio Detection
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Anhui University（安徽大学）
University of Kent（肯特大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Lübeck（吕贝克大学）
Due to the variability in characteristics of audio scenes, some scenes can naturally be recognized earlier than others. In this work, rather than using equal-length snippets for all scene categories, as is common in the literature, we study to which temporal extent an audio scene can be reliably recognized given state-of-the-art models. Moreover, as model fusion with deep network ensemble is prevalent in audio scene classification, we further study whether, and if so, when model fusion is necessary for this task. To achieve these goals, we employ two single-network systems relying on a convolu…
In daily life, social interaction and acoustic communication often take place in complex acoustic environments (CAE) with a variety of interfering sounds and reverberation. For hearing research and the evaluation of hearing systems, simulated CAEs using virtual reality techniques have gained interest in the context of ecological validity. In the current study, the effect of scene complexity and visual representation of the scene on psychoacoustic measures like sound source location, distance perception, loudness, speech intelligibility, and listening effort in a virtual audio-visual environmen…
Using perceptive subbands analysis to perform audio scenes cartography
Institut d’esthétique des arts contemporains - UMR 8592 (CNRS/Université Paris 1/MENRT)（当代艺术美学研究所 - UMR 8592（法国国家科研中心/巴黎第一大学/法国国家研究部））；ENS Louis-Lumière（路易·卢米埃尔国立高等学院）
Previous works on scene classification are mainly based on audio or visual signals, while humans perceive the environmental scenes through multiple senses. Recent studies on audio-visual scene classification separately fine-tune the largescale audio and image pre-trained models on the target dataset, then either fuse the intermediate representations of the audio model and the visual model, or fuse the coarse-grained decision of both models at the clip level. Such methods ignore the detailed audio events and visual objects in audio-visual scenes (AVS), while humans often identify different scen…
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs（三菱电机研究实验室）
There exists an unequivocal distinction between the sound produced by a static source and that produced by a moving one, especially when the source moves towards or away from the microphone. In this paper, we propose to use this connection between audio and visual dynamics for solving two challenging tasks simultaneously, namely: (i) separating audio sources from a mixture using visual cues, and (ii) predicting the 3D visual motion of a sounding source using its separated audio. Towards this end, we present Audio Separator and Motion Predictor (ASMP) -- a deep learning framework that leverages…
The thud of a bouncing ball, the onset of speech as lips open -- when visual and audio events occur together, it suggests that there might be a common, underlying event that produced both signals. In this paper, we argue that the visual and audio components of a video signal should be modeled jointly using a fused multisensory representation. We propose to learn such a representation in a self-supervised way, by training a neural network to predict whether video frames and audio are temporally aligned. We use this learned representation for three applications: (a) sound source localization, i.…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Tencent Corporation（腾讯公司）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Enna Kore（恩纳科雷大学）
In this paper, we propose two techniques, namely joint modeling and data augmentation, to improve system performances for audio-visual scene classification (AVSC). We employ pre-trained networks trained only on image data sets to extract video embedding; whereas for audio embedding models, we decide to train them from scratch. We explore different neural network architectures for joint modeling to effectively combine the video and audio modalities. Moreover, data augmentation strategies are investigated to increase audio-visual training set size. For the video modality the effectiveness of sev…
With the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) such as Alexa, Google Home, etc., have become a ubiquitous part of many homes. Currently, such IVAs are mostly audio-based, but going forward, we are witnessing a confluence of vision, speech and dialog system technologies that are enabling the IVAs to learn audio-visual groundings of utterances. This will enable agents to have conversations with users about the objects, activities and events surrounding them. In this work, we present three main architectural explorations for the Audio Visual Sce…
Acoustic scene classification systems using deep neural networks classify given recordings into pre-defined classes. In this study, we propose a novel scheme for acoustic scene classification which adopts an audio tagging system inspired by the human perception mechanism. When humans identify an acoustic scene, the existence of different sound events provides discriminative information which affects the judgement. The proposed framework mimics this mechanism using various approaches. Firstly, we employ three methods to concatenate tag vectors extracted using an audio tagging system with an int…
Joint Prediction of Audio Event and Annoyance Rating in an Urban Soundscape by Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning
Ghent University（根特大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Ghent University-Imec（根特大学-imec）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
The recently proposed audio-visual scene-aware dialog task paves the way to a more data-driven way of learning virtual assistants, smart speakers and car navigation systems. However, very little is known to date about how to effectively extract meaningful information from a plethora of sensors that pound the computational engine of those devices. Therefore, in this paper, we provide and carefully analyze a simple baseline for audio-visual scene-aware dialog which is trained end-to-end. Our method differentiates in a data-driven manner useful signals from distracting ones using an attention mec…
CMDAR: A Chinese Multi-scene Dynamic Audio Reasoning Benchmark with Diverse Challenges
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（计算机科学与人工智能学院，复旦大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；IEIT Systems Co Ltd（IEIT系统有限公司）
