A Method of Environmental Sound Classification Based on Residual Networks and Data Augmentation

Environmental sound classification (ESC) is a challenging problem due to the complexity of sounds. To date, a variety of signal processing and machine learning techniques have been applied to ESC task, including matrix factorization, dictionary learning, wavelet filterbanks and deep neural networks. It is observed that features extracted from deeper networks tend to achieve higher performance than those extracted from shallow networks. However, in ESC task, only the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which contain several layers are used and the residual networks are ignored, which lead to degradation in the performance. Meanwhile, a possible explanation for the limited exploration of CNNs and the difficulty to improve on simpler models is the relative scarcity of labeled data for ESC. In this paper, a residual network called EnvResNet for the ESC task is proposed. In addition, we propose to use audio data augmentation to overcome the problem of data scarcity. The experiments will be performed on the ESC-50 database. Combined with data augmentation, the proposed model outperforms baseline implementations relying on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and achieves results comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of classification accuracy.