Acoustic Scene Classification: A Competition Review
This work provides insights into method selection for acoustic scene classification, but it is incremental as it builds on existing competition frameworks and educational practices.
The paper reviewed an acoustic scene classification competition, identifying effective methods and showing improvements over a neural network baseline through an ablation study.
In this paper we study the problem of acoustic scene classification, i.e., categorization of audio sequences into mutually exclusive classes based on their spectral content. We describe the methods and results discovered during a competition organized in the context of a graduate machine learning course; both by the students and external participants. We identify the most suitable methods and study the impact of each by performing an ablation study of the mixture of approaches. We also compare the results with a neural network baseline, and show the improvement over that. Finally, we discuss the impact of using a competition as a part of a university course, and justify its importance in the curriculum based on student feedback.