Receptive-field-regularized CNN variants for acoustic scene classification
This work addresses acoustic scene classification for audio processing applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing CNN methods with specific modifications.
The paper tackled the problem of acoustic scene classification by investigating receptive field configurations in CNNs and introducing Frequency Aware CNNs to compensate for lost frequency information, resulting in well-performing submissions to the DCASE 2019 Challenge.
Acoustic scene classification and related tasks have been dominated by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Top-performing CNNs use mainly audio spectograms as input and borrow their architectural design primarily from computer vision. A recent study has shown that restricting the receptive field (RF) of CNNs in appropriate ways is crucial for their performance, robustness and generalization in audio tasks. One side effect of restricting the RF of CNNs is that more frequency information is lost. In this paper, we perform a systematic investigation of different RF configuration for various CNN architectures on the DCASE 2019 Task 1.A dataset. Second, we introduce Frequency Aware CNNs to compensate for the lack of frequency information caused by the restricted RF, and experimentally determine if and in what RF ranges they yield additional improvement. The result of these investigations are several well-performing submissions to different tasks in the DCASE 2019 Challenge.