Recognition of acoustic events using deep neural networks

This paper proposes the use of a deep neural network for the recognition of isolated acoustic events such as footsteps, baby crying, motorcycle, rain etc. For an acoustic event classification task containing 61 distinct classes, classification accuracy of the neural network classifier (60.3%) excels that of the conventional Gaussian mixture model based hidden Markov model classifier (54.8%). In addition, an unsupervised layer-wise pretraining followed by standard backpropagation training of a deep network (known as a deep belief network) results in further increase of 2-4% in classification accuracy. Effects of implementation parameters such as types of features and number of adjacent frames as additional features are found to be significant on classification accuracy.