Artificial sound event detection (SED) aims to mimic the human ability to perceive and understand what is happening in the surroundings. Nowadays, deep learning offers valuable techniques for this goal, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The capsule neural network (CapsNet) architecture has been recently introduced in the image processing field with the intent to overcome some of the known limitations of CNNs, specifically regarding the scarce robustness to affine transformations (i.e., perspective, size, and orientation) and the detection of overlapped images. This motivated the authors to employ CapsNets to deal with the polyphonic SED task, in which multiple sound events occur simultaneously. Specifically, we propose to exploit the capsule units to represent a set of distinctive properties for each individual sound event. Capsule units are connected through a so-called dynamic routing that encourages learning part-whole relationships and improves the detection performance in a polyphonic context. This paper reports extensive evaluations carried out on three publicly available datasets, showing how the CapsNet-based algorithm not only outperforms standard CNNs but also achieves the best results with respect to the state-of-the-art algorithms.
The combination of the CNN structure with recurrent units has increased the detection performance by taking advantage of the characteristics of each architecture. This is the case of convolutional recurrent neural networks (CRNNs) @cite_27 , which provided state-of-the-art performance especially in the case of polyphonic SED. CRNNs consolidate the CNN property of local shift invariance with the capability to model short and long term temporal dependencies provided by the RNN layers. This architecture has been also employed in almost all of the most performing algorithms proposed in the recent editions of research challenges such as the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) @cite_31 . On the other hand, if the datasets are not sufficiently large, problems such as overfitting can be encountered with these models, which typically are composed of a considerable number of free-parameters (i.e., more than 1M).
@cite_27 @cite_31
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Sound events often occur in unstructured environments where they exhibit wide variations in their frequency content and temporal structure. Convolutional neural networks CNNs are able to extract higher level features that are invariant to local spectral and temporal variations. Recurrent neural networks RNNs are powerful in learning the longer term temporal context in the audio signals. CNNs and RNNs as classifiers have recently shown improved performances over established methods in various sound recognition tasks. We combine these two approaches in a convolutional recurrent neural network CRNN and apply it on a polyphonic sound event detection task. We compare the performance of the proposed CRNN method with CNN, RNN, and other established methods, and observe a considerable improvement for four different datasets consisting of everyday sound events. In recent years, the convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved great success in many computer vision tasks. Partially inspired by neuroscience, CNN shares many properties with the visual system of the brain. A prominent difference is that CNN is typically a feed-forward architecture while in the visual system recurrent connections are abundant. Inspired by this fact, we propose a recurrent CNN (RCNN) for object recognition by incorporating recurrent connections into each convolutional layer. Though the input is static, the activities of RCNN units evolve over time so that the activity of each unit is modulated by the activities of its neighboring units. This property enhances the ability of the model to integrate the context information, which is important for object recognition. Like other recurrent neural networks, unfolding the RCNN through time can result in an arbitrarily deep network with a fixed number of parameters. Furthermore, the unfolded network has multiple paths, which can facilitate the learning process. The model is tested on four benchmark object recognition datasets: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST and SVHN. With fewer trainable parameters, RCNN outperforms the state-of-the-art models on all of these datasets. Increasing the number of parameters leads to even better performance. These results demonstrate the advantage of the recurrent structure over purely feed-forward structure for object recognition. We introduce a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) for music tagging. CRNNs take advantage of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for local feature extraction and recurrent neural networks for temporal summarisation of the extracted features. We compare CRNN with three CNN structures that have been used for music tagging while controlling the number of parameters with respect to their performance and training time per sample. Overall, we found that CRNNs show a strong performance with respect to the number of parameter and training time, indicating the effectiveness of its hybrid structure in music feature extraction and feature summarisation. In existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs), both convolution and pooling are locally performed for image regions separately, no contextual dependencies between different image regions have been taken into consideration. Such dependencies represent useful spatial structure information in images. Whereas recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are designed for learning contextual dependencies among sequential data by using the recurrent (feedback) connections. In this work, we propose the convolutional recurrent neural network (C-RNN), which learns the spatial dependencies between image regions to enhance the discriminative power of image representation. The C-RNN is trained in an end-to-end manner from raw pixel images. CNN layers are firstly processed to generate middle level features. RNN layer is then learned to encode spatial dependencies. The C-RNN can learn better image representation, especially for images with obvious spatial contextual dependencies. Our method achieves competitive performance on ILSVRC 2012, SUN 397, and MIT indoor.