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Modern automated acoustic classifiers have been shown to perform remarkably well with human speech recognition and music genre classification. These problems are well defined; there is a deep understanding of the source signal, and the required robustness of the model can be decreased without significantly sacrificing accuracy. Unfortunately, this simplification creates models that are insufficient when tasked with classifying environmental noise, which is inherently more variable and difficult to constrain. To further close the gap between human and computer recognition, we must find feature extraction techniques that address the additional set of complexities involved with environmental noise. In this paper, we will explore sophisticated feature extraction techniques (e.g., convolutional auto-encoders and scattering networks), and discuss their effect when applied to acoustic classification.

With the advent of reliable and continuously operating noise monitoring systems, we are now faced with an unprecedented amount of noise monitor data. In the context of environmental noise monitoring, there is a need to automatically detect, separate, and classify all environmental noise sources. This is a complex task because sources can overlap, vary by location, and have an unbounded number of noise sources that a monitor device may record. In this study, we synthetically generate datasets that contain Gaussian noise and overlaps for several pre-labeled environmental noise monitoring datasets to examine how well deep learning methods (e.g., autoencoders) can separate environmental noise sources. In addition to examining performance, we also focus on understanding which signal features and separation metrics are useful to this problem.

Deep learning is becoming ubiquitous; it is the underlying and driving force behind many heavily embedded technologies in society (e.g., search engines, fraud detection warning systems, and social-media facial recognition algorithms). Over the past few years there has been a steady increase in the number of audio related applications of deep learning. Recently, Nykaza et al. presented a pedagogical approach to understanding how the hidden layers recreate, separate, and classify environmental noise signals. That work presented some feature extraction examples using simple pure tone, chord, and environmental noise datasets. In this paper, we build upon this recent analysis and expand the datasets to include more realistic representations of those datasets with the inclusion of noise and overlapping signals. Additionally, we consider other related architectures (e.g., variant-autoencoders, recurrent neural networks, and fixing hidden nodes/layers), explore their advantages/drawbacks, and provide insights on ...

Deep learning is becoming ubiquitous; it is the underlying and driving force behind many technologies we use everyday (e.g., search engines, fraud detection warning systems, and social-media facial recognition algorithms). Over the past few years, there has been a steady increase in the number of audio and acoustics related applications of deep learning. But what is exactly going on under the hood? In this paper, we focus on deep learning algorithms for unsupervised feature learning. We take a pedagogical approach to understanding how the hidden layers recreate, separate, and classify audio signals. We begin with a simple pure tone dataset, and systematically increase the complexity of this dataset in both frequency and time. We end the presentation with some feature extraction examples from real-world environmental recordings, and find that these features are easier to interpret given the understanding developed from the simpler tone datasets. The unsupervised feature learning techniques explored in this paper include: restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) and auto-encoders (AEs).