Auditory Neural Response Inspired Sound Event Detection Based on Spectro-temporal Receptive Field

Sound event detection (SED) is one of tasks to automate function by human auditory system which listens and understands auditory scenes. Therefore, we were inspired to make SED recognize sound events in the way human auditory system does. Spectro-temporal receptive field (STRF), an approach to describe the relationship between perceived sound at ear and transformed neural response in the auditory cortex, is closely related to recognition of sound. In this work, we utilized STRF as a kernel of the first convolutional layer in SED model to extract neural response from input sound to make SED model similar to human auditory system. In addition, we constructed two-branched SED model named as Two Branch STRFNet (TB-STRFNet) composed of STRF branch and baseline branch. While STRF branch extracts sound event information from auditory neural response, baseline branch extracts sound event information directly from the mel spectrogram just as conventional SED models do. TB-STRFNet outperformed the DCASE baseline by 4.3% in terms of threshold-independent macro F1 score, achieving 4th rank in DCASE Challenge 2023 Task 4b. We further improved TB-STRFNet by applying frequency dynamic convolution (FDYConv) which also leveraged domain knowledge on acoustics. As a result, two branch model applied with FDYConv on both branches outperformed the DCASE baseline by 6.2% in terms of the same metric.

Frequency & Channel Attention for computationally efficient sound event detection

We explore on various attention methods on frequency and channel dimensions for sound event detection (SED) in order to enhance performance with minimal increase in computational cost while leveraging domain knowledge to address the frequency dimension of audio data. We have introduced frequency dynamic convolution in a previous work to release the translational equivariance issue associated with 2D convolution on the frequency dimension of 2D audio data. Although this approach demonstrated state-of-the-art SED performance, it resulted in 2.5 times heavier model in terms of the number of parameters. To achieve comparable SED performance with computationally efficient methods to enhance practicality, we explore on lighter alternative attention methods. In addition, we focus of attention methods on frequency and channel dimensions as those are shown to be critical in SED. Joint application of SE modules on both frequency and channel dimension shows comparable performance to frequency dynamic convolution with only 2.7% increase in the model size compared to the baseline model. In addition, we performed class-wise comparison of various attention methods to further discuss their characteristics.

Data Augmentation and Squeeze-and-Excitation Network on Multiple Dimension for Sound Event Localization and Detection in Real Scenes

Performance of sound event localization and detection (SELD) in real scenes is limited by small size of SELD dataset, due to difficulty in obtaining sufficient amount of realistic multi-channel audio data recordings with accurate label. We used two main strategies to solve problems arising from the small real SELD dataset. First, we applied various data augmentation methods on all data dimensions: channel, frequency and time. We also propose original data augmentation method named Moderate Mixup in order to simulate situations where noise floor or interfering events exist. Second, we applied Squeeze-and-Excitation block on channel and frequency dimensions to efficiently extract feature characteristics. Result of our trained models on the STARSS22 test dataset achieved the best ER, F1, LE, and LR of 0.53, 49.8%, 16.0deg., and 56.2% respectively.

Frequency Dependent Sound Event Detection for DCASE 2022 Challenge Task 4

While many deep learning methods on other domains have been applied to sound event detection (SED), differences between original domains of the methods and SED have not been appropriately considered so far. As SED uses audio data with two dimensions (time and frequency) for input, thorough comprehension on these two dimensions is essential for application of methods from other domains on SED. Previous works proved that methods those address on frequency dimension are especially powerful in SED. By applying FilterAugment and frequency dynamic convolution those are frequency dependent methods proposed to enhance SED performance, our submitted models achieved best PSDS1 of 0.4704 and best PSDS2 of 0.8224.