Identifying Actions for Sound Event Classification
This work addresses sound event classification for audio processing by introducing a novel psychology-inspired approach, though it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The paper tackled the problem of sound event classification by incorporating human-identified actions as semantic representations, achieving a high accuracy of 88% on the ESC-50 dataset.
In Psychology, actions are paramount for humans to identify sound events. In Machine Learning (ML), action recognition achieves high accuracy; however, it has not been asked whether identifying actions can benefit Sound Event Classification (SEC), as opposed to mapping the audio directly to a sound event. Therefore, we propose a new Psychology-inspired approach for SEC that includes identification of actions via human listeners. To achieve this goal, we used crowdsourcing to have listeners identify 20 actions that in isolation or in combination may have produced any of the 50 sound events in the well-studied dataset ESC-50. The resulting annotations for each audio recording relate actions to a database of sound events for the first time. The annotations were used to create semantic representations called Action Vectors (AVs). We evaluated SEC by comparing the AVs with two types of audio features -- log-mel spectrograms and state-of-the-art audio embeddings. Because audio features and AVs capture different abstractions of the acoustic content, we combined them and achieved one of the highest reported accuracies (88%).