Environmental Sound Classification Based on Multi-temporal Resolution Convolutional Neural Network Combining with Multi-level Features

Motivated by the fact that characteristics of different sound classes are highly diverse in different temporal scales and hierarchical levels, a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed for the environmental sound classification task. This network architecture takes raw waveforms as input, and a set of separated parallel CNNs are utilized with different convolutional filter sizes and strides, in order to learn feature representations with multi-temporal resolutions. On the other hand, the proposed architecture also aggregates hierarchical features from multi-level CNN layers for classification using direct connections between convolutional layers, which is beyond the typical single-level CNN features employed by the majority of previous studies. This network architecture also improves the flow of information and avoids vanishing gradient problem. The combination of multi-level features boosts the classification performance significantly. Comparative experiments are conducted on two datasets: the environmental sound classification dataset (ESC-50), and DCASE 2017 audio scene classification dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed method is highly effective in the classification tasks by employing multi-temporal resolution and multi-level features, and it outperforms the previous methods which only account for single-level features.