Acoustic scene classification (ASC) is a problem related to the field of machine listening whose objective is to classify/tag an audio clip in a predefined label describing a scene location (e. g. park, airport, etc.). Many state-of-the-art solutions to ASC incorporate data augmentation techniques and model ensembles. However, considerable improvements can also be achieved only by modifying the architecture of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this work we propose two novel squeeze-excitation blocks to improve the accuracy of a CNN-based ASC framework based on residual learning. The main idea of squeeze-excitation blocks is to learn spatial and channel-wise feature maps independently instead of jointly as standard CNNs do. This is usually achieved by some global grouping operators, linear operators and a final calibration between the input of the block and its obtained relationships. The behavior of the block that implements such operators and, therefore, the entire neural network, can be modified depending on the input to the block, the established residual configurations and the selected non-linear activations. The analysis has been carried out using the TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes 2019 dataset (https://zenodo.org/record/2589280) presented in the 2019 edition of the DCASE challenge. All configurations discussed in this document exceed the performance of the baseline proposed by the DCASE organization by 13\% percentage points. In turn, the novel configurations proposed in this paper outperform the residual configurations proposed in previous works.
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…
Sound event localisation and detection (SELD) is a problem in the field of automatic listening that aims at the temporal detection and localisation (direction of arrival estimation) of sound events within an audio clip, usually of long duration. Due to the amount of data present in the datasets related to this problem, solutions based on deep learning have positioned themselves at the top of the state of the art. Most solutions are based on 2D representations of the audio (different spectrograms) that are processed by a convolutional-recurrent network. The motivation of this submission is to s…
Visualfy（Visualfy公司）；Universitat de València（瓦伦西亚大学）
Sound Event Localization and Detection (SELD) is a problem related to the field of machine listening whose objective is to recognize individual sound events, detect their temporal activity, and estimate their spatial location. Thanks to the emergence of more hard-labeled audio datasets, deep learning techniques have become state-of-the-art solutions. The most common ones are those that implement a convolutional recurrent network (CRNN) having previously transformed the audio signal into multichannel 2D representation. The squeeze-excitation technique can be considered as a convolution enhancem…
Residual networks, which use a residual unit to supplement the identity mappings, enable very deep convolutional architecture to operate well, however, the residual architecture has been proved to be diverse and redundant, which may leads to low-efficient modeling. In this work, we propose a competitive squeeze-excitation (SE) mechanism for the residual network. Re-scaling the value for each channel in this structure will be determined by the residual and identity mappings jointly, and this design enables us to expand the meaning of channel relationship modeling in residual blocks. Modeling of…
It is a practical research topic how to deal with multi-device audio inputs by a single acoustic scene classification system with efficient design. In this work, we propose Residual Normalization, a novel feature normalization method that uses frequency-wise normalization % instance normalization with a shortcut path to discard unnecessary device-specific information without losing useful information for classification. Moreover, we introduce an efficient architecture, BC-ResNet-ASC, a modified version of the baseline architecture with a limited receptive field. BC-ResNet-ASC outperforms the b…
Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）；Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）
This technical report describes the details of our TASK1A submission of the DCASE2021 challenge. The goal of the task is to design an audio scene classification system for device-imbalanced datasets under the constraints of model complexity. This report introduces four methods to achieve the goal. First, we propose Residual Normalization, a novel feature normalization method that uses instance normalization with a shortcut path to discard unnecessary device-specific information without losing useful information for classification. Second, we design an efficient architecture, BC-ResNet-Mod, a m…
In this study, we introduce a convolutional time-frequency-channel "Squeeze and Excitation" (tfc-SE) module to explicitly model inter-dependencies between the time-frequency domain and multiple channels. The tfc-SE module consists of two parts: tf-SE block and c-SE block which are designed to provide attention on time-frequency and channel domain, respectively, for adaptively recalibrating the input feature map. The proposed tfc-SE module, together with a popular Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) model, are evaluated on a multi-channel sound event detection task with overlapping au…
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Universitat Jaume I（海梅一世大学）；ITEAM（信息技术与多媒体应用研究所）
This paper presents an acoustic echo canceler based on a U-Net convolutional neural network for single-talk and double-talk scenarios. U-Net networks have previously been used in the audio processing area for source separation problems because of their ability to reproduce the finest details of audio signals, but to our knowledge, this is the first time they have been used for acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). The U-Net hyperparameters have been optimized to obtain the best AEC performance, but using a reduced number of parameters to meet a latency restriction of 40 ms. The training and testin…
Austria Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所）；The University of Danang（岘港大学）；University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；Hongik University（弘益大学）
In this paper, we present a robust and low complexity system for Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC), the task of identifying the scene of an audio recording. We first construct an ASC baseline system in which a novel inception-residual-based network architecture is proposed to deal with the mismatched recording device issue. To further improve the performance but still satisfy the low complexity model, we apply two techniques: ensemble of multiple spectrograms and channel reduction on the ASC baseline system. By conducting extensive experiments on the benchmark DCASE 2020 Task 1A Development …
We present JHU's system submission to the ASVspoof 2019 Challenge: Anti-Spoofing with Squeeze-Excitation and Residual neTworks (ASSERT). Anti-spoofing has gathered more and more attention since the inauguration of the ASVspoof Challenges, and ASVspoof 2019 dedicates to address attacks from all three major types: text-to-speech, voice conversion, and replay. Built upon previous research work on Deep Neural Network (DNN), ASSERT is a pipeline for DNN-based approach to anti-spoofing. ASSERT has four components: feature engineering, DNN models, network optimization and system combination, where th…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
In this paper, we propose a classification based glottal closure instants (GCI) detection from pathological acoustic speech signal, which finds many applications in vocal disorder analysis. Till date, GCI for pathological disorder is extracted from laryngeal (glottal source) signal recorded from Electroglottograph, a dedicated device designed to measure the vocal folds vibration around the larynx. We have created a pathological dataset which consists of simultaneous recordings of glottal source and acoustic speech signal of six different disorders from vocal disordered patients. The GCI locati…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies（法兰克福高等研究院）；Xidian-FIAS international Joint Research Center（西电-法兰克福高等研究院国际联合研究中心）；Goethe Universität（歌德大学）；GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH（GSI亥姆霍兹重离子研究中心有限责任公司）；SAMSOM AG（萨姆森股份公司）
With the rapid development of smart manufacturing, data-driven machinery health management has received a growing attention. As one of the most popular methods in machinery health management, deep learning (DL) has achieved remarkable successes. However, due to the issues of limited samples and poor separability of different cavitation states of acoustic signals, which greatly hinder the eventual performance of DL modes for cavitation intensity recognition and cavitation detection. In this work, a novel multi-task learning framework for simultaneous cavitation detection and cavitation intensit…
In this work, we present a two-stage method for speaker extraction under reverberant and noisy conditions. Given a reference signal of the desired speaker, the clean, but the still reverberant, desired speaker is first extracted from the noisy-mixed signal. In the second stage, the extracted signal is further enhanced by joint dereverberation and residual noise and interference reduction. The proposed architecture comprises two sub-networks, one for the extraction task and the second for the dereverberation task. We present a training strategy for this architecture and show that the performanc…
Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所）；University of Technology, Austria（奥地利技术大学）；Da Nang University（岘港大学）；University of Technology of Compiègne（贡比涅技术大学）
In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC), the task of identifying the scene of an audio recording from its acoustic signature. In particular, we firstly propose an inception-based and low footprint ASC model, referred to as the ASC baseline. The proposed ASC baseline is then compared with benchmark and high-complexity network architectures of MobileNetV1, MobileNetV2, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50V2, ResNet152V2, DenseNet121, DenseNet201, and Xception. Next, we improve the ASC baseline by proposing a novel deep neural network architecture which leverag…
An interpolation method for region-to-region acoustic transfer functions (ATFs) based on kernel ridge regression with an adaptive kernel is proposed. Most current ATF interpolation methods do not incorporate the acoustic properties for which measurements are performed. Our proposed method is based on a separate adaptation of directional weighting functions to directed and residual reverberations, which are used for adapting kernel functions. Thus, the proposed method can not only impose constraints on fundamental acoustic properties, but can also adapt to the acoustic environment. Numerical ex…
Acoustic echo degrades the user experience in voice communication systems thus needs to be suppressed completely. We propose a real-time residual acoustic echo suppression (RAES) method using an efficient convolutional neural network. The double talk detector is used as an auxiliary task to improve the performance of RAES in the context of multi-task learning. The training criterion is based on a novel loss function, which we call as the suppression loss, to balance the suppression of residual echo and the distortion of near-end signals. The experimental results show that the proposed method c…
Institute of Information and Decision Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学信息与决策技术研究所）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究所）
In this paper, we propose a deep residual network-based method, namely the DiCOVA-Net, to identify COVID-19 infected patients based on the acoustic recording of their coughs. Since there are far more healthy people than infected patients, this classification problem faces the challenge of imbalanced data. To improve the model's ability to recognize minority class (the infected patients), we introduce data augmentation and cost-sensitive methods into our model. Besides, considering the particularity of this task, we deploy some fine-tuning techniques to adjust the pre-training ResNet50. Further…
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is the primary recurrent neural networks architecture for acoustic modeling in automatic speech recognition systems. Residual learning is an efficient method to help neural networks converge easier and faster. In this paper, we propose several types of residual LSTM methods for our acoustic modeling. Our experiments indicate that, compared with classic LSTM, our architecture shows more than 8% relative reduction in Phone Error Rate (PER) on TIMIT tasks. At the same time, our residual fast LSTM approach shows 4% relative reduction in PER on the same task. Besides, …
Modulation Feature Enhancement with a Multi-Stage Attention Network for Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition
Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学计算机科学与电子工程学院）
Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) plays a key role in voice interaction. Due to the explicit mathematical principle and intelligent nature to accommodate conditions, adaptive filters with different types of implementations are always used for AEC, giving considerable performance. However, there would be some kinds of residual echo in the results, including linear residue introduced by mismatching between estimation and the reality and non-linear residue mostly caused by non-linear components on the audio devices. The linear residue can be reduced with elaborate structure and methods, leaving th…
Acoustic echo cannot be entirely removed by linear adaptive filters due to the nonlinear relationship between the echo and far-end signal. Usually a post processing module is required to further suppress the echo. In this paper, we propose a residual echo suppression method based on the modification of fully convolutional time-domain audio separation network (Conv-TasNet). Both the residual signal of the linear acoustic echo cancellation system, and the output of the adaptive filter are adopted to form multiple streams for the Conv-TasNet, resulting in more effective echo suppression while kee…
In industrial applications, the early detection of malfunctioning factory machinery is crucial. In this paper, we consider acoustic malfunction detection via transfer learning. Contrary to the majority of current approaches which are based on deep autoencoders, we propose to extract features using neural networks that were pretrained on the task of image classification. We then use these features to train a variety of anomaly detection models and show that this improves results compared to convolutional autoencoders in recordings of four different factory machines in noisy environments. Moreov…
G H Raisoni College of Engg.（G H Raisoni工程学院）；SGB Amravati University（SGB阿姆拉瓦蒂大学）
In this paper a generalized postfilter algorithm design issues are presented. This postfilter is used to jointly suppress late reverberation, residual echo, and background noise. When residual echo and noise are suppressed, the best result obtains by suppressing both interferences together after the Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). The main advantage of this approach is that the residual echo and noise suppression does not suffer from the existence of a strong acoustic echo component. Furthermore, the Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) does not suffer from the time-varying noise suppression. A …
Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), noise suppression (NS) and automatic gain control (AGC) are three often required modules for real-time communications (RTC). This paper proposes a neural network supported algorithm for RTC, namely NN3A, which incorporates an adaptive filter and a multi-task model for residual echo suppression, noise reduction and near-end speech activity detection. The proposed algorithm is shown to outperform both a method using separate models and an end-to-end alternative. It is further shown that there exists a trade-off in the model between residual suppression and near-…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
This paper proposes VARA-TTS, a non-autoregressive (non-AR) text-to-speech (TTS) model using a very deep Variational Autoencoder (VDVAE) with Residual Attention mechanism, which refines the textual-to-acoustic alignment layer-wisely. Hierarchical latent variables with different temporal resolutions from the VDVAE are used as queries for residual attention module. By leveraging the coarse global alignment from previous attention layer as an extra input, the following attention layer can produce a refined version of alignment. This amortizes the burden of learning the textual-to-acoustic alignme…
In speaker verification, the extraction of voice representations is mainly based on the Residual Neural Network (ResNet) architecture. ResNet is built upon convolution layers which learn filters to capture local spatial patterns along all the input, then generate feature maps that jointly encode the spatial and channel information. Unfortunately, all feature maps in a convolution layer are learnt independently (the convolution layer does not exploit the dependencies between feature maps) and locally. This problem has first been tackled in image processing. A channel attention mechanism, called…
Diffracted scattering and occlusion are important acoustic effects in interactive auralization and noise control applications, typically requiring expensive numerical simulation. We propose training a convolutional neural network to map from a convex scatterer's cross-section to a 2D slice of the resulting spatial loudness distribution. We show that employing a full-resolution residual network for the resulting image-to-image regression problem yields spatially detailed loudness fields with a root-mean-squared error of less than 1 dB, at over 100x speedup compared to full wave simulation.
Stuttering is a speech impediment affecting tens of millions of people on an everyday basis. Even with its commonality, there is minimal data and research on the identification and classification of stuttered speech. This paper tackles the problem of detection and classification of different forms of stutter. As opposed to most existing works that identify stutters with language models, our work proposes a model that relies solely on acoustic features, allowing for identification of several variations of stutter disfluencies without the need for speech recognition. Our model uses a deep residu…
This paper presents a real-time Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) algorithm submitted to the AEC-Challenge. The algorithm consists of three modules: Generalized Cross-Correlation with PHAse Transform (GCC-PHAT) based time delay compensation, weighted Recursive Least Square (wRLS) based linear adaptive filtering and neural network based residual echo suppression. The wRLS filter is derived from a novel semi-blind source separation perspective. The neural network model predicts a Phase-Sensitive Mask (PSM) based on the aligned reference and the linear filter output. The algorithm achieved a mean …
This study addresses robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) by introducing a Conformer-based acoustic model. The proposed model builds on the wide residual bi-directional long short-term memory network (WRBN) with utterance-wise dropout and iterative speaker adaptation, but employs a Conformer encoder instead of the recurrent network. The Conformer encoder uses a convolution-augmented attention mechanism for acoustic modeling. The proposed system is evaluated on the monaural ASR task of the CHiME-4 corpus. Coupled with utterance-wise normalization and speaker adaptation, our model achieves …
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（国立信息与通信技术研究所）；Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academic Sinica（中央研究院资讯科技创新研究中心）
A major advantage of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is that the focused receptive field size is increased by stacking multiple convolutional layers. Accordingly, the model can explore the long-range dependency of features from the top layers. However, a potential limitation of the network is that the discriminative features from the bottom layers (which can model the short-range dependency) are smoothed out in the final representation. This limitation is especially evident in the acoustic event classification (AEC) task, where both short- and long-duration events are involved in an …
Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In hands-free communication system, the coupling between loudspeaker and microphone generates echo signal, which can severely influence the quality of communication. Meanwhile, various types of noise in communication environments further reduce speech quality and intelligibility. It is difficult to extract the near-end signal from the microphone signal within one step, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios. In this paper, we propose a deep complex network approach to address this issue. Specially, we decompose the stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation into two stages, including l…
Transfer Learning-Based Deep Residual Learning for Speech Recognition in Clean and Noisy Environments
Speech and Signal Processing Laboratory University of Sciences and Technology, USTHB（信号与处理实验室，科学与技术大学，USTHB）；LSEA Laboratory, dept. Electrical engineering University of MEDEA（LSEA实验室，电气工程系，MEDEA大学）；Research Laboratory in Human-System Interaction Universite de Moncton, Shippagan Campus（人机交互研究实验室，蒙特龙大学，Shippagan校区）
The use of multiple and semantically correlated sources can provide complementary information to each other that may not be evident when working with individual modalities on their own. In this context, multi-modal models can help producing more accurate and robust predictions in machine learning tasks where audio-visual data is available. This paper presents a multi-modal model for automatic scene classification that exploits simultaneously auditory and visual information. The proposed approach makes use of two separate networks which are respectively trained in isolation on audio and visual …
Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) whose aim is to suppress the echo originated from acoustic coupling between loudspeakers and microphones, plays a key role in voice interaction. Linear adaptive filter (AF) is always used for handling this problem. However, since there would be some severe effects in real scenarios, such nonlinear distortions, background noises, and microphone clipping, it would lead to considerable residual echo, giving poor performance in practice. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end network structure for echo cancellation, which is directly done on time-domain audio wave…
Spectral mapping uses a deep neural network (DNN) to map directly from noisy speech to clean speech. Our previous study found that the performance of spectral mapping improves greatly when using helpful cues from an acoustic model trained on clean speech. The mapper network learns to mimic the input favored by the spectral classifier and cleans the features accordingly. In this study, we explore two new innovations: we replace a DNN-based spectral mapper with a residual network that is more attuned to the goal of predicting clean speech. We also examine how integrating long term context in the…
Institute for Communications Technology, Technische Universität Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学通信技术研究所）
In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) were studied as an alternative to traditional acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) algorithms. The proposed models achieved remarkable performance for the separate tasks of AEC and residual echo suppression (RES). A promising network topology is a fully convolutional recurrent network (FCRN) structure, which has already proven its performance on both noise suppression and AEC tasks, individually. However, the combination of AEC, postfiltering, and noise suppression to a single network typically leads to a noticeable decline in the quality of the near-en…
Echo and noise suppression is an integral part of a full-duplex communication system. Many recent acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) systems rely on a separate adaptive filtering module for linear echo suppression and a neural module for residual echo suppression. However, not only do adaptive filtering modules require convergence and remain susceptible to changes in acoustic environments, but this two-stage framework also often introduces unnecessary delays to the AEC system when neural modules are already capable of both linear and nonlinear echo suppression. In this paper, we exploit the offs…
Audio-Video Emotion Recognition is now attacked with Deep Neural Network modeling tools. In published papers, as a rule, the authors show only cases of the superiority in multi-modality over audio-only or video-only modality. However, there are cases superiority in uni-modality can be found. In our research, we hypothesize that for fuzzy categories of emotional events, the within-modal and inter-modal noisy information represented indirectly in the parameters of the modeling neural network impedes better performance in the existing late fusion and end-to-end multi-modal network training strate…
