text: 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.
  @cite_3: In recent years, deep learning has not only permeated the computer vision and speech recognition research fields but also fields such as acoustic event detection (AED). One of the aims of AED is to detect and classify non-speech acoustic events occurring in conversation scenes including those produced by both humans and the objects that surround us. In AED, deep learning has enabled modeling of detail-rich features, and among these, high resolution spectrograms have shown a significant advantage over existing predefined features (e.g., Mel-filter bank) that compress and reduce detail. In this paper, we further asses the importance of feature extraction for deep learning-based acoustic event detection. AED, based on spectrogram-input deep neural networks, exploits the fact that sounds have “global” spectral patterns, but sounds also have “local” properties such as being more transient or smoother in the time-frequency domain. These can be exposed by adjusting the time-frequency resolution used to compute the spectrogram, or by using a model that exploits locality leading us to explore two different feature extraction strategies in the context of deep learning: (1) using multiple resolution spectrograms simultaneously and analyzing the overall and event-wise influence to combine the results, and (2) introducing the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN), a state of the art 2D feature extraction model that exploits local structures, with log power spectrogram input for AED. An experimental evaluation shows that the approaches we describe outperform our state-of-the-art deep learning baseline with a noticeable gain in the CNN case and provides insights regarding CNN-based spectrogram characterization for AED.
summary: The use of deep learning models has been motivated by the increased availability of datasets and computational resources and resulted in significant performance improvements. The methods based on CNNs and RNNs have established the new state-of-the-art performance on the SED task, thanks to the capabilities to learn the non-linear relationship between time-frequency features of the audio signal and a target vector representing sound events. In @cite_3 , the authors show how local'' patterns can be learned by a CNN and can be exploited to improve the performance of detection and classification of non-speech acoustic events occurring in conversation scenes, in particular compared to a FNN-based system which processes multiple resolution spectrograms in parallel.