Data augmentation is an inexpensive way to increase training data diversity and is commonly achieved via transformations of existing data. For tasks such as classification, there is a good case for learning representations of the data that are invariant to such transformations, yet this is not explicitly enforced by classification losses such as the cross-entropy loss. This paper investigates the use of training objectives that explicitly impose this consistency constraint and how it can impact downstream audio classification tasks. In the context of deep convolutional neural networks in the supervised setting, we show empirically that certain measures of consistency are not implicitly captured by the cross-entropy loss and that incorporating such measures into the loss function can improve the performance of audio classification systems. Put another way, we demonstrate how existing augmentation methods can further improve learning by enforcing consistency.
DEI, University of Padua（帕多瓦大学信息工程系）；BioMediTech, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University（坦佩雷大学医学与健康技术学院生物医学技术研究所）
Audio data augmentation is a key step in training deep neural networks for solving audio classification tasks. In this paper, we introduce Audiogmenter, a novel audio data augmentation library in MATLAB. We provide 15 different augmentation algorithms for raw audio data and 8 for spectrograms. We efficiently implemented several augmentation techniques whose usefulness has been extensively proved in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest MATLAB audio data augmentation library freely available. We validate the efficiency of our algorithms evaluating them on the ESC-50 …
An Xception model reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on the ESC-50 dataset for audio event detection through knowledge transfer from ImageNet weights, pretraining on AudioSet, and an on-the-fly data augmentation pipeline. This paper presents an ablation study that analyzes which components contribute to the boost in performance and training time. A smaller Xception model is also presented which nears SOTA performance with almost a third of the parameters.
Institute of Computational Perception (CP-JKU)（计算感知研究所（CP-JKU））；LIT Artificial Intelligence Lab（LIT人工智能实验室）；Johannes Kepler University（约翰内斯·开普勒大学）
The absence of large labeled datasets remains a significant challenge in many application areas of deep learning. Researchers and practitioners typically resort to transfer learning and data augmentation to alleviate this issue. We study these strategies in the context of audio retrieval with natural language queries (Task 6b of the DCASE 2022 Challenge). Our proposed system uses pre-trained embedding models to project recordings and textual descriptions into a shared audio-caption space in which related examples from different modalities are close. We employ various data augmentation techniqu…
In this paper we introduce StoRIR - a stochastic room impulse response generation method dedicated to audio data augmentation in machine learning applications. This technique, in contrary to geometrical methods like image-source or ray tracing, does not require prior definition of room geometry, absorption coefficients or microphone and source placement and is dependent solely on the acoustic parameters of the room. The method is intuitive, easy to implement and allows to generate RIRs of very complicated enclosures. We show that StoRIR, when used for audio data augmentation in a speech enhanc…
University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
In this paper we present ensembles of classifiers for automated animal audio classification, exploiting different data augmentation techniques for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The specific animal audio classification problems are i) birds and ii) cat sounds, whose datasets are freely available. We train five different CNNs on the original datasets and on their versions augmented by four augmentation protocols, working on the raw audio signals or their representations as spectrograms. We compared our best approaches with the state of the art, showing that we obtain the best re…
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度孟买理工学院）；Verisk Analytics（威睿凯分析公司）
Time masking has become a de facto augmentation technique for speech and audio tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio classification, most notably as a part of SpecAugment. In this work, we propose SpliceOut, a simple modification to time masking which makes it computationally more efficient. SpliceOut performs comparably to (and sometimes outperforms) SpecAugment on a wide variety of speech and audio tasks, including ASR for seven different languages using varying amounts of training data, as well as on speech translation, sound and music classification, thus establishi…
While efficient architectures and a plethora of augmentations for end-to-end image classification tasks have been suggested and heavily investigated, state-of-the-art techniques for audio classifications still rely on numerous representations of the audio signal together with large architectures, fine-tuned from large datasets. By utilizing the inherited lightweight nature of audio and novel audio augmentations, we were able to present an efficient end-to-end network with strong generalization ability. Experiments on a variety of sound classification sets demonstrate the effectiveness and robu…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Audio tagging has attracted increasing attention since last decade and has various potential applications in many fields. The objective of audio tagging is to predict the labels of an audio clip. Recently deep learning methods have been applied to audio tagging and have achieved state-of-the-art performance, which provides a poor generalization ability on new data. However due to the limited size of audio tagging data such as DCASE data, the trained models tend to result in overfitting of the network. Previous data augmentation methods such as pitch shifting, time stretching and adding backgro…
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Sony Group Corporation（索尼集团公司）
Data augmentation methods have shown great importance in diverse supervised learning problems where labeled data is scarce or costly to obtain. For sound event localization and detection (SELD) tasks several augmentation methods have been proposed, with most borrowing ideas from other domains such as images, speech, or monophonic audio. However, only a few exploit the spatial properties of a full 3D audio scene. We propose Spatial Mixup, as an application of parametric spatial audio effects for data augmentation, which modifies the directional properties of a multi-channel spatial audio signal…
Reusing recorded sounds (sampling) is a key component in Electronic Music Production (EMP), which has been present since its early days and is at the core of genres like hip-hop or jungle. Commercial and non-commercial services allow users to obtain collections of sounds (sample packs) to reuse in their compositions. Automatic classification of one-shot instrumental sounds allows automatically categorising the sounds contained in these collections, allowing easier navigation and better characterisation. Automatic instrument classification has mostly targeted the classification of unprocessed i…
Instrument classification is one of the fields in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) that has attracted a lot of research interest. However, the majority of that is dealing with monophonic music, while efforts on polyphonic material mainly focus on predominant instrument recognition. In this paper, we propose an approach for instrument classification in polyphonic music from purely monophonic data, that involves performing data augmentation by mixing different audio segments. A variety of data augmentation techniques focusing on different sonic aspects, such as overlaying audio segments of the …
Inspired by the recent progress in self-supervised learning for computer vision that generates supervision using data augmentations, we explore a new general-purpose audio representation learning approach. We propose learning general-purpose audio representation from a single audio segment without expecting relationships between different time segments of audio samples. To implement this principle, we introduce Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) for Audio (BYOL-A, pronounced "viola"), an audio self-supervised learning method based on BYOL for learning general-purpose audio representation. Unlike…
Music source separation (MSS) is the task of separating a music piece into individual sources, such as vocals and accompaniment. Recently, neural network based methods have been applied to address the MSS problem, and can be categorized into spectrogram and time-domain based methods. However, there is a lack of research of using complementary information of spectrogram and time-domain inputs for MSS. In this article, we propose a CatNet framework that concatenates a UNet separation branch using spectrogram as input and a WavUNet separation branch using time-domain waveform as input for MSS. We…
Performance Improvement of Language-Queried Audio Source Separation Based on Caption Augmentation From Large Language Models for DCASE Challenge 2024 Task 9
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）；Aunion AI, Co. Ltd.（Aunion AI有限公司）
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
In recent years, deep learning technique has received intense attention owing to its great success in image recognition. A tendency of adaption of deep learning in various information processing fields has formed, including music information retrieval (MIR). In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on music audio classification with improved convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To the best of our knowledge, this the first work to apply Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNet) to music audio tagging, which has been demonstrated to perform better than Residual neural network (…
Speed Co-Augmentation for Unsupervised Audio-Visual Pre-training
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Dyson Robot Learning Lab（戴森机器人学习实验室）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
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…
We present a Multi-Window Data Augmentation (MWA-SER) approach for speech emotion recognition. MWA-SER is a unimodal approach that focuses on two key concepts; designing the speech augmentation method and building the deep learning model to recognize the underlying emotion of an audio signal. Our proposed multi-window augmentation approach generates additional data samples from the speech signal by employing multiple window sizes in the audio feature extraction process. We show that our augmentation method, combined with a deep learning model, improves speech emotion recognition performance. W…
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.
Targeted Augmented Data for Audio Deepfake Detection
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学跨学科安全、可靠性与信任中心（SnT））；Cristal Laboratory, National School of Computer Sciences (ENSI), Manouba University（马努巴大学计算机科学国家学院（ENSI）克里斯塔尔实验室）
University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）；Missouri State University（密苏里州立大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
In this paper, ensembles of classifiers that exploit several data augmentation techniques and four signal representations for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for audio classification are presented and tested on three freely available audio classification datasets: i) bird calls, ii) cat sounds, and iii) the Environmental Sound Classification dataset. The best performing ensembles combining data augmentation techniques with different signal representations are compared and shown to outperform the best methods reported in the literature on these datasets. The approach proposed here…
A mixed sample data augmentation strategy is proposed to enhance the performance of models on audio scene classification, sound event classification, and speech enhancement tasks. While there have been several augmentation methods shown to be effective in improving image classification performance, their efficacy toward time-frequency domain features of audio is not assured. We propose a novel audio data augmentation approach named "Specmix" specifically designed for dealing with time-frequency domain features. The augmentation method consists of mixing two different data samples by applying t…
Dementia is a growing problem as our society ages, and detection methods are often invasive and expensive. Recent deep-learning techniques can offer a faster diagnosis and have shown promising results. However, they require large amounts of labelled data which is not easily available for the task of dementia detection. One effective solution to sparse data problems is data augmentation, though the exact methods need to be selected carefully. To date, there has been no empirical study of data augmentation on Alzheimer's disease (AD) datasets for NLP and speech processing. In this work, we inves…
In this paper, we demonstrate a unique recipe to enhance the effectiveness of audio machine learning approaches by fusing pre-processing techniques into a deep learning model. Our solution accelerates training and inference performance by optimizing hyper-parameters through training instead of costly random searches to build a reliable mosquito detector from audio signals. The experiments and the results presented here are part of the MOS C submission of the ACM 2022 challenge. Our results outperform the published baseline by 212% on the unpublished test set. We believe that this is one of the…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Shanghai Media Tech（上海传媒科技）
Audio-driven talking face has attracted broad interest from academia and industry recently. However, data acquisition and labeling in audio-driven talking face are labor-intensive and costly. The lack of data resource results in poor synthesis effect. To alleviate this issue, we propose to use TTS (Text-To-Speech) for data augmentation to improve few-shot ability of the talking face system. The misalignment problem brought by the TTS audio is solved with the introduction of soft-DTW, which is first adopted in the talking face task. Moreover, features extracted by HuBERT are explored to utilize…
Collecting sufficient amount of data that can represent various acoustic environmental attributes is a critical problem for distributed acoustic machine learning. Several audio data augmentation techniques have been introduced to address this problem but they tend to remain in simple manipulation of existing data and are insufficient to cover the variability of the environments. We propose a method to extend a technique that has been used for transferring acoustic style textures between audio data. The method transfers audio signatures between environments for distributed acoustic data augment…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）
Existing audio analysis methods generally first transform the audio stream to spectrogram, and then feed it into CNN for further analysis. A standard CNN recognizes specific visual patterns over feature map, then pools for high-level representation, which overlooks the positional information of recognized patterns. However, unlike natural image, the semantic of an audio spectrogram is sensitive to positional change, as its vertical and horizontal axes indicate the frequency and temporal information of the audio, instead of naive rectangular coordinates. Thus, the insensitivity of CNN to positi…
Contrastive learning enables learning useful audio and speech representations without ground-truth labels by maximizing the similarity between latent representations of similar signal segments. In this framework various data augmentation techniques are usually exploited to help enforce desired invariances within the learned representations, improving performance on various audio tasks thanks to more robust embeddings. Now, selecting the most relevant augmentations has proven crucial for better downstream performances. Thus, this work introduces a conditional independance-based method which all…
In this paper, we perform an in-depth study of how data augmentation techniques improve synthetic or spoofed audio detection. Specifically, we propose methods to deal with channel variability, different audio compressions, different band-widths, and unseen spoofing attacks, which have all been shown to significantly degrade the performance of audio-based systems and Anti-Spoofing systems. Our results are based on the ASVspoof 2021 challenge, in the Logical Access (LA) and Deep Fake (DF) categories. Our study is Data-Centric, meaning that the models are fixed and we significantly improve the re…
