Description and Discussion on DCASE 2024 Challenge Task 2: First-Shot Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection for Machine Condition Monitoring

We present the task description of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2024 Challenge Task 2: First-shot unsupervised anomalous sound detection (ASD) for machine condition monitoring. Continuing from last year's DCASE 2023 Challenge Task 2, we organize the task as a first-shot problem under domain generalization required settings. The main goal of the first-shot problem is to enable rapid deployment of ASD systems for new kinds of machines without the need for machine-specific hyperparameter tunings. This problem setting was realized by (1) giving only one section for each machine type and (2) having completely different machine types for the development and evaluation datasets. For the DCASE 2024 Challenge Task 2, data of completely new machine types were newly collected and provided as the evaluation dataset. In addition, attribute information such as the machine operation conditions were concealed for several machine types to mimic situations where such information are unavailable. We will add challenge results and analysis of the submissions after the challenge submission deadline.

Distributed collaborative anomalous sound detection by embedding sharing

To develop a machine sound monitoring system, a method for detecting anomalous sound is proposed. In this paper, we explore a method for multiple clients to collaboratively learn an anomalous sound detection model while keeping their raw data private from each other. In the context of industrial machine anomalous sound detection, each client possesses data from different machines or different operational states, making it challenging to learn through federated learning or split learning. In our proposed method, each client calculates embeddings using a common pre-trained model developed for sound data classification, and these calculated embeddings are aggregated on the server to perform anomalous sound detection through outlier exposure. Experiments showed that our proposed method improves the AUC of anomalous sound detection by an average of 6.8%.

Streaming Active Learning for Regression Problems Using Regression via Classification

One of the challenges in deploying a machine learning model is that the model's performance degrades as the operating environment changes. To maintain the performance, streaming active learning is used, in which the model is retrained by adding a newly annotated sample to the training dataset if the prediction of the sample is not certain enough. Although many streaming active learning methods have been proposed for classification, few efforts have been made for regression problems, which are often handled in the industrial field. In this paper, we propose to use the regression-via-classification framework for streaming active learning for regression. Regression-via-classification transforms regression problems into classification problems so that streaming active learning methods proposed for classification problems can be applied directly to regression problems. Experimental validation on four real data sets shows that the proposed method can perform regression with higher accuracy at the same annotation cost.

CAPTDURE: Captioned Sound Dataset of Single Sources

In conventional studies on environmental sound separation and synthesis using captions, datasets consisting of multiple-source sounds with their captions were used for model training. However, when we collect the captions for multiple-source sound, it is not easy to collect detailed captions for each sound source, such as the number of sound occurrences and timbre. Therefore, it is difficult to extract only the single-source target sound by the model-training method using a conventional captioned sound dataset. In this work, we constructed a dataset with captions for a single-source sound named CAPTDURE, which can be used in various tasks such as environmental sound separation and synthesis. Our dataset consists of 1,044 sounds and 4,902 captions. We evaluated the performance of environmental sound extraction using our dataset. The experimental results show that the captions for single-source sounds are effective in extracting only the single-source target sound from the mixture sound.

Anomalous Sound Detection Based on Sound Separation

This paper proposes an unsupervised anomalous sound detection method using sound separation. In factory environments, background noise and non-objective sounds obscure desired machine sounds, making it challenging to detect anomalous sounds. Therefore, using sounds not mixed with background noise or non-purpose sounds in the detection system is desirable. We compared two versions of our proposed method, one using sound separation as a pre-processing step and the other using separation-based outlier exposure that uses the error between two separated sounds. Based on the assumption that differences in separation performance between normal and anomalous sounds affect detection results, a sound separation model specific to a particular product type was used in both versions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method improved anomalous sound detection performance for all Machine IDs, achieving a maximum improvement of 39%.

Description and Discussion on DCASE 2023 Challenge Task 2: First-Shot Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection for Machine Condition Monitoring

We present the task description of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2023 Challenge Task 2: "First-shot unsupervised anomalous sound detection (ASD) for machine condition monitoring". The main goal is to enable rapid deployment of ASD systems for new kinds of machines using only a few normal samples, without the need for hyperparameter tuning. In the past ASD tasks, developed methods tuned hyperparameters for each machine type, as the development and evaluation datasets had the same machine types. However, collecting normal and anomalous data as the development dataset can be infeasible in practice. In 2023 Task 2, we focus on solving first-shot problem, which is the challenge of training a model on a few machines of a completely novel machine type. Specifically, (i) each machine type has only one section, and (ii) machine types in the development and evaluation datasets are completely different. We will add challenge results and analysis of the submissions after the challenge submission deadline.

Description and Discussion on DCASE 2022 Challenge Task 2: Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection for Machine Condition Monitoring Applying Domain Generalization Techniques

We present the task description of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2022 Challenge Task 2: "Unsupervised anomalous sound detection (ASD) for machine condition monitoring applying domain generalization techniques". Domain shifts are a critical problem for the application of ASD systems. Because domain shifts can change the acoustic characteristics of data, a model trained in a source domain performs poorly for a target domain. In DCASE 2021 Challenge Task 2, we organized an ASD task for handling domain shifts. In this task, it was assumed that the occurrences of domain shifts are known. However, in practice, the domain of each sample may not be given, and the domain shifts can occur implicitly. In 2022 Task 2, we focus on domain generalization techniques that detects anomalies regardless of the domain shifts. Specifically, the domain of each sample is not given in the test data and only one threshold is allowed for all domains. We will add challenge results and analysis of the submissions after the challenge submission deadline.

MIMII DG: Sound Dataset for Malfunctioning Industrial Machine Investigation and Inspection for Domain Generalization Task

We present a machine sound dataset to benchmark domain generalization techniques for anomalous sound detection (ASD). To handle performance degradation caused by domain shifts that are difficult to detect or too frequent to adapt, domain generalization techniques are preferred. However, currently available datasets have difficulties in evaluating these techniques, such as limited number of values for parameters that cause domain shifts (domain shift parameters). In this paper, we present the first ASD dataset for the domain generalization techniques, called MIMII DG. The dataset consists of five machine types and three domain shift scenarios for each machine type. We prepared at least two values for the domain shift parameters in the source domain. Also, we introduced domain shifts that can be difficult to notice. Experimental results using two baseline systems indicate that the dataset reproduces the domain shift scenarios and is useful for benchmarking domain generalization techniques.

Anomalous Sound Detection Based on Machine Activity Detection

We have developed an unsupervised anomalous sound detection method for machine condition monitoring that utilizes an auxiliary task -- detecting when the target machine is active. First, we train a model that detects machine activity by using normal data with machine activity labels and then use the activity-detection error as the anomaly score for a given sound clip if we have access to the ground-truth activity labels in the inference phase. If these labels are not available, the anomaly score is calculated through outlier detection on the embedding vectors obtained by the activity-detection model. Solving this auxiliary task enables the model to learn the difference between the target machine sounds and similar background noise, which makes it possible to identify small deviations in the target sounds. Experimental results showed that the proposed method improves the anomaly-detection performance of the conventional method complementarily by means of an ensemble.

Disentangling Physical Parameters for Anomalous Sound Detection Under Domain Shifts

To develop a sound-monitoring system for machines, a method for detecting anomalous sound under domain shifts is proposed. A domain shift occurs when a machine's physical parameters change. Because a domain shift changes the distribution of normal sound data, conventional unsupervised anomaly detection methods can output false positives. To solve this problem, the proposed method constrains some latent variables of a normalizing flows (NF) model to represent physical parameters, which enables disentanglement of the factors of domain shifts and learning of a latent space that is invariant with respect to these domain shifts. Anomaly scores calculated from this domain-shift-invariant latent space are unaffected by such shifts, which reduces false positives and improves the detection performance. Experiments were conducted with sound data from a slide rail under different operation velocities. The results show that the proposed method disentangled the velocity to obtain a latent space that was invariant with respect to domain shifts, which improved the AUC by 13.2% for Glow with a single block and 2.6% for Glow with multiple blocks.