Stethoscope-guided Supervised Contrastive Learning for Cross-domain Adaptation on Respiratory Sound Classification

Despite the remarkable advances in deep learning technology, achieving satisfactory performance in lung sound classification remains a challenge due to the scarcity of available data. Moreover, the respiratory sound samples are collected from a variety of electronic stethoscopes, which could potentially introduce biases into the trained models. When a significant distribution shift occurs within the test dataset or in a practical scenario, it can substantially decrease the performance. To tackle this issue, we introduce cross-domain adaptation techniques, which transfer the knowledge from a source domain to a distinct target domain. In particular, by considering different stethoscope types as individual domains, we propose a novel stethoscope-guided supervised contrastive learning approach. This method can mitigate any domain-related disparities and thus enables the model to distinguish respiratory sounds of the recording variation of the stethoscope. The experimental results on the ICBHI dataset demonstrate that the proposed methods are effective in reducing the domain dependency and achieving the ICBHI Score of 61.71%, which is a significant improvement of 2.16% over the baseline.

Adversarial Fine-tuning using Generated Respiratory Sound to Address Class Imbalance

Deep generative models have emerged as a promising approach in the medical image domain to address data scarcity. However, their use for sequential data like respiratory sounds is less explored. In this work, we propose a straightforward approach to augment imbalanced respiratory sound data using an audio diffusion model as a conditional neural vocoder. We also demonstrate a simple yet effective adversarial fine-tuning method to align features between the synthetic and real respiratory sound samples to improve respiratory sound classification performance. Our experimental results on the ICBHI dataset demonstrate that the proposed adversarial fine-tuning is effective, while only using the conventional augmentation method shows performance degradation. Moreover, our method outperforms the baseline by 2.24% on the ICBHI Score and improves the accuracy of the minority classes up to 26.58%. For the supplementary material, we provide the code at https://github.com/kaen2891/adversarial_fine-tuning_using_generated_respiratory_sound.

Vocoder-free End-to-End Voice Conversion with Transformer Network

Mel-frequency filter bank (MFB) based approaches have the advantage of learning speech compared to raw spectrum since MFB has less feature size. However, speech generator with MFB approaches require additional vocoder that needs a huge amount of computation expense for training process. The additional pre/post processing such as MFB and vocoder is not essential to convert real human speech to others. It is possible to only use the raw spectrum along with the phase to generate different style of voices with clear pronunciation. In this regard, we propose a fast and effective approach to convert realistic voices using raw spectrum in a parallel manner. Our transformer-based model architecture which does not have any CNN or RNN layers has shown the advantage of learning fast and solved the limitation of sequential computation of conventional RNN. In this paper, we introduce a vocoder-free end-to-end voice conversion method using transformer network. The presented conversion model can also be used in speaker adaptation for speech recognition. Our approach can convert the source voice to a target voice without using MFB and vocoder. We can get an adapted MFB for speech recognition by multiplying the converted magnitude with phase. We perform our voice conversion experiments on TIDIGITS dataset using the metrics such as naturalness, similarity, and clarity with mean opinion score, respectively.