Active Learning for Sound Event Detection
This work addresses the challenge of reducing annotation costs for sound event detection, particularly for rare events, representing an incremental improvement in active learning methods for audio data.
This paper tackles the problem of sound event detection with limited annotation effort by proposing an active learning system that selects sound segments for manual annotation, achieving similar performance with only 2% of annotated data on a rare event dataset.
This paper proposes an active learning system for sound event detection (SED). It aims at maximizing the accuracy of a learned SED model with limited annotation effort. The proposed system analyzes an initially unlabeled audio dataset, from which it selects sound segments for manual annotation. The candidate segments are generated based on a proposed change point detection approach, and the selection is based on the principle of mismatch-first farthest-traversal. During the training of SED models, recordings are used as training inputs, preserving the long-term context for annotated segments. The proposed system clearly outperforms reference methods in the two datasets used for evaluation (TUT Rare Sound 2017 and TAU Spatial Sound 2019). Training with recordings as context outperforms training with only annotated segments. Mismatch-first farthest-traversal outperforms reference sample selection methods based on random sampling and uncertainty sampling. Remarkably, the required annotation effort can be greatly reduced on the dataset where target sound events are rare: by annotating only 2% of the training data, the achieved SED performance is similar to annotating all the training data.