Sense of hearing is crucial for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to better perceive its surrounding environment. Although visual sensors of an AV, such as camera, lidar, and radar, help to see its surrounding environment, an AV cannot see beyond those sensors line of sight. On the other hand, an AV s sense of hearing cannot be obstructed by line of sight. For example, an AV can identify an emergency vehicle s siren through audio classification even though the emergency vehicle is not within the line of sight of the AV. Thus, auditory perception is complementary to the camera, lidar, and radar-based perception systems. This paper presents a deep learning-based robust audio classification framework aiming to achieve improved environmental perception for AVs. The presented framework leverages a deep Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to classify different audio classes. UrbanSound8k, an urban environment dataset, is used to train and test the developed framework. Seven audio classes i.e., air conditioner, car horn, children playing, dog bark, engine idling, gunshot, and siren, are identified from the UrbanSound8k dataset because of their relevancy related to AVs. Our framework can classify different audio classes with 97.82% accuracy. Moreover, the audio classification accuracies with all ten classes are presented, which proves that our framework performed better in the case of AV-related sounds compared to the existing audio classification frameworks.
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology（乔莫·肯雅塔农业技术大学）
Machine hearing of the environmental sound is one of the important issues in the audio recognition domain. It gives the machine the ability to discriminate between the different input sounds that guides its decision making. In this work we exploit the self-supervised contrastive technique and a shallow 1D CNN to extract the distinctive audio features (audio representations) without using any explicit annotations.We generate representations of a given audio using both its raw audio waveform and spectrogram and evaluate if the proposed learner is agnostic to the type of audio input. We further u…
Increasing amount of research has shed light on machine perception of audio events, most of which concerns detection and classification tasks. However, human-like perception of audio scenes involves not only detecting and classifying audio sounds, but also summarizing the relationship between different audio events. Comparable research such as image caption has been conducted, yet the audio field is still quite barren. This paper introduces a manually-annotated dataset for audio caption. The purpose is to automatically generate natural sentences for audio scene description and to bridge the ga…
VALOR: Vision-Audio-Language Omni-Perception Pretraining Model and Dataset
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
This paper introduces the Voices Obscured In Complex Environmental Settings (VOICES) corpus, a freely available dataset under Creative Commons BY 4.0. This dataset will promote speech and signal processing research of speech recorded by far-field microphones in noisy room conditions. Publicly available speech corpora are mostly composed of isolated speech at close-range microphony. A typical approach to better represent realistic scenarios, is to convolve clean speech with noise and simulated room response for model training. Despite these efforts, model performance degrades when tested agains…
Currently available benchmarks for few-shot learning (machine learning with few training examples) are limited in the domains they cover, primarily focusing on image classification. This work aims to alleviate this reliance on image-based benchmarks by offering the first comprehensive, public and fully reproducible audio based alternative, covering a variety of sound domains and experimental settings. We compare the few-shot classification performance of a variety of techniques on seven audio datasets (spanning environmental sounds to human-speech). Extending this, we carry out in-depth analys…
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…
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University（哈佛大学工程与应用科学学院）；K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University（康奈尔大学鸟类学实验室K. Lisa Yang保护生物声学中心）
Monitoring of bird populations has played a vital role in conservation efforts and in understanding biodiversity loss. The automation of this process has been facilitated by both sensing technologies, such as passive acoustic monitoring, and accompanying analytical tools, such as deep learning. However, machine learning models frequently have difficulty generalizing to examples not encountered in the training data. In our work, we present a semi-supervised approach to identify characteristic calls and environmental noise. We utilize several methods to learn a latent representation of audio sam…
LongVALE: Vision-Audio-Language-Event Benchmark Towards Time-Aware Omni-Modal Perception of Long Videos
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
Joint Text-Audio Alignment for EEG-to-Text Decoding in Chinese Speech Production and Perception
University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；Beijing Language and Culture University（北京语言大学）
Deepfake is content or material that is generated or manipulated using AI methods, to pass off as real. There are four different deepfake types: audio, video, image and text. In this research we focus on audio deepfakes and how people perceive it. There are several audio deepfake generation frameworks, but we chose MelGAN which is a non-autoregressive and fast audio deepfake generating framework, requiring fewer parameters. This study tries to assess audio deepfake perceptions among college students from different majors. This study also answers the question of how their background and major c…
This paper introduces the Procedural (audio) Variational autoEncoder (ProVE) framework as a general approach to learning Procedural Audio PA models of environmental sounds with an improvement to the realism of the synthesis while maintaining provision of control over the generated sound through adjustable parameters. The framework comprises two stages: (i) Audio Class Representation, in which a latent representation space is defined by training an audio autoencoder, and (ii) Control Mapping, in which a joint function of static/temporal control variables derived from the audio and a random samp…
Towards Fine-grained Temporal Perception: Post-Training Large Audio-Language Models with Audio-Side Time Prompt
National Engineering Research Center of Speech and Language Information Processing, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China（语音与语言信息处理国家级工程研究中心，中国科学技术大学，合肥，中国）；ICT Cluster, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore（新加坡理工学院ICT集群，新加坡）
本文提出Audio-Side Time Prompt方法，结合强化学习改进大音频-语言模型的时间感知能力，在音频定位、事件检测等任务中取得显著提升。
National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；SOKENDAI（综合研究大学院大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
In this paper, we introduce our recent studies on human perception in audio event classification by different deep learning models. In particular, the pre-trained model VGGish is used as feature extractor to process audio data, and DenseNet is trained by and used as feature extractor for our electroencephalography (EEG) data. The correlation between audio stimuli and EEG is learned in a shared space. In the experiments, we record brain activities (EEG signals) of several subjects while they are listening to music events of 8 audio categories selected from Google AudioSet, using a 16-channel EE…
Semantic Proximity Alignment: Towards Human Perception-consistent Audio Tagging by Aligning with Label Text Description
Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing, Ministry of Education（空天信息安全与可信计算教育部重点实验室）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学网络空间安全学院）
University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；University College Cork（科克大学）
This technical report details changes applied to a noise filter to facilitate its application and improve its results. The filter is applied to denoise natural sounds recorded in the wild and to generate an acoustic index used in soundscape analysis.
Robert Bosch LLC（罗伯特·博世有限责任公司）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The lack of strong labels has severely limited the state-of-the-art fully supervised audio tagging systems to be scaled to larger dataset. Meanwhile, audio-visual learning models based on unlabeled videos have been successfully applied to audio tagging, but they are inevitably resource hungry and require a long time to train. In this work, we propose a light-weight, multimodal framework for environmental audio tagging. The audio branch of the framework is a convolutional and recurrent neural network (CRNN) based on multiple instance learning (MIL). It is trained with the audio tracks of a larg…
Audio and visual signals complement each other in human speech perception, so do they in speech recognition. The visual hint is less evident than the acoustic hint, but more robust in a complex acoustic environment, as far as speech perception is concerned. It remains a challenge how we effectively exploit the interaction between audio and visual signals for automatic speech recognition. There have been studies to exploit visual signals as redundant or complementary information to audio input in a synchronous manner. Human studies suggest that visual signal primes the listener in advance as to…
International Audio Laboratories Erlangen（埃尔朗根国际音频实验室）；TU Ilmenau（伊尔梅瑙工业大学）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits（弗劳恩霍夫集成电路研究所）
Research into multi-modal perception, human cognition, behavior, and attention can benefit from high-fidelity content that may recreate real-life-like scenes when rendered on head-mounted displays. Moreover, aspects of audiovisual perception, cognitive processes, and behavior may complement questionnaire-based Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluation of interactive virtual environments. Currently, there is a lack of high-quality open-source audiovisual databases that can be used to evaluate such aspects or systems capable of reproducing high-quality content. With this paper, we provide a publicl…
Beyond Transcription: Unified Audio Schema for Perception-Aware AudioLLMs
Basic Model Technology Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc.（腾讯基本模型技术中心、微信AI、腾讯公司）；State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University（多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室、计算机学院、北京大学）
University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）；University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；American University（美利坚大学）
Recently, adversarial machine learning attacks have posed serious security threats against practical audio signal classification systems, including speech recognition, speaker recognition, and music copyright detection. Previous studies have mainly focused on ensuring the effectiveness of attacking an audio signal classifier via creating a small noise-like perturbation on the original signal. It is still unclear if an attacker is able to create audio signal perturbations that can be well perceived by human beings in addition to its attack effectiveness. This is particularly important for music…
Towards Explicit Acoustic Evidence Perception in Audio LLMs for Speech Deepfake Detection
State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication（媒体融合与传播国家重点实验室）；Communication University of China（中国传媒大学）；Machine Intelligence（人工智能）；Key Laboratory of Media Audio & Video, Ministry of Education, Communication University of China（教育部媒体音频视频重点实验室）
After its sweeping success in vision and language tasks, pure attention-based neural architectures (e.g. DeiT) are emerging to the top of audio tagging (AT) leaderboards, which seemingly obsoletes traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs), feed-forward networks or recurrent networks. However, taking a closer look, there is great variability in published research, for instance, performances of models initialized with pretrained weights differ drastically from without pretraining, training time for a model varies from hours to weeks, and often, essences are hidden in seemingly trivial det…
Environmental sound classification systems often do not perform robustly across different sound classification tasks and audio signals of varying temporal structures. We introduce a multi-stream convolutional neural network with temporal attention that addresses these problems. The network relies on three input streams consisting of raw audio and spectral features and utilizes a temporal attention function computed from energy changes over time. Training and classification utilizes decision fusion and data augmentation techniques that incorporate uncertainty. We evaluate this network on three …
