City Classification from Multiple Real-World Sound Scenes

Helen L. Bear, Toni Heittola, Annamaria Mesaros, Emmanouil Benetos, Tuomas Virtanen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)
11 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The majority of sound scene analysis work focuses on one of two clearly defined tasks: acoustic scene classification or sound event detection. Whilst this separation of tasks is useful for problem definition, they inherently ignore some subtleties of the real-world, in particular how humans vary in how they describe a scene. Some will describe the weather and features within it, others will use a holistic descriptor like ‘park’, and others still will use unique identifiers such as cities or names. In this paper, we undertake the task of automatic city classification to ask whether we can recognize a city from a set of sound scenesƒ In this problem each city has recordings from multiple scenes. We test a series of methods for this novel task and show that a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) can achieve accuracy of 50%. This is less than the acoustic scene classification task baseline in the DCASE 2018 ASC challenge on the same data. A simple adaptation to the class labels of pairing city labels with grouped scenes, accuracy increases to 52%, closer to the simpler scene classification task. Finally we also formulate the problem in a multi-task learning framework and achieve an accuracy of 56%, outperforming the aforementioned approaches.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2019 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA)
PublisherIEEE
Pages11-15
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-7281-1123-0
ISBN (Print)978-1-7281-1124-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019
Publication typeA4 Article in conference proceedings
EventIEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics -
Duration: 1 Jan 1900 → …

Publication series

NameIEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics
ISSN (Print)1931-1168
ISSN (Electronic)1947-1629

Conference

ConferenceIEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics
Period1/01/00 → …

Keywords

  • Acoustic scene classification
  • location identification
  • city classification
  • computational sound scene analysis

Publication forum classification

  • Publication forum level 1

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