Content-based Audio Classification Research Articles

Content-Based Audio Classification and Retrieving Using Modified Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm.

Audio classification and retrieval has been recognized as a fascinating field of endeavor for as long as it has existed due to the topic of identifying and choosing the most useful audio attributes. The categorization of audio files is significant not only in the area of multimedia applications but also in the disciplines of medicine, sound analysis, intelligent homes and cities, urban informatics, entertainment, and surveillance. This study introduces a new algorithm called the modified bacterial foraging optimization algorithm (MBFOA), which is based on a method that retrieves and classifies audio data. The goal of this algorithm is to reduce the computational complexity of existing techniques. Along with the combination of the peak estimated signal, the enhanced mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (EMFCC) and the enhanced power normalized cepstral coefficients (EPNCC) are used. These are then optimized using the fitness function utilizing MBFOA. The probabilistic neural network is used to differentiate between a music signal and a spoken signal from an audio source (PNN). It is next necessary to extract and list the characteristics that correspond to the class that was arrived at as a consequence of the categorization. When compared to other approaches that are somewhat similar, MBFOA demonstrates superior levels of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy.

An mHealth System for Monitoring Medication Adherence in Obstructive Respiratory Diseases Using Content Based Audio Classification

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are obstructive respiratory diseases that affect negatively the quality of life for patients and their families worldwide. Despite the significance of these diseases, their management has been considered suboptimal around the world, whereas the improper inhaler use has been underlined as one of the main causes. Toward this direction, this paper presents an integrated mHealth system that provides real-time personalized feedback to patients for assessing the proper medication use and educating them and helping them avoid common mistakes. The identification of proper inhaler use is based on conventional and data-driven feature extraction and classification methods employed for the identification of four events (inhaler actuation, inhalation, exhalation, and background noise). The proposed scheme reaches 98% classification accuracy significantly outperforming recent and relevant state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, intuitive feedback interfaces were implemented in the form of a virtual guidance agent integrated with the mobile application, which can help patients follow their action plan and assess their inhaler technique in a more engaging manner. Extensive simulation studies, carried out using 12 subjects, demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approaches in both indoor and outdoor environments.

An overview of applications and advancements in automatic sound recognition

Automatic sound recognition (ASR) has attracted increased and wide ranging interests in recent years. In this paper, we carry out a review of some important contributions in ASR techniques, mainly over the last one and a half decades. Similar to speech recognition systems, the robustness of an ASR system largely depends on the choice of feature(s) and classifier(s). We take a wider perspective in providing an overview of the features and classifiers used in ASR systems starting from early works in content-based audio classification to more recent developments in applications such as sound event recognition, audio surveillance, and environmental sound recognition. We also review techniques that have been utilized in noise robust sound recognition systems and feature optimization methods. Finally, some of the less commonly known applications of ASR are discussed.

An analysis of content-based classification of audio signals using a fuzzy c-means algorithm

Content-based audio signal classification into broad categories such as speech, music, or speech with noise is the first step before any further processing such as speech recognition, content-based indexing, or surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient content-based audio classification approach to classify audio signals into broad genres using a fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm. We analyze different characteristic features of audio signals in time, frequency, and coefficient domains and select the optimal feature vector by employing a noble analytical scoring method to each feature. We utilize an FCM-based classification scheme and apply it on the extracted normalized optimal feature vector to achieve an efficient classification result. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art audio classification systems by more than 11% in classification performance.

Discrimination of speech from nonspeech based on multiscale spectro-temporal Modulations

We describe a content-based audio classification algorithm based on novel multiscale spectro-temporal modulation features inspired by a model of auditory cortical processing. The task explored is to discriminate speech from nonspeech consisting of animal vocalizations, music, and environmental sounds. Although this is a relatively easy task for humans, it is still difficult to automate well, especially in noisy and reverberant environments. The auditory model captures basic processes occurring from the early cochlear stages to the central cortical areas. The model generates a multidimensional spectro-temporal representation of the sound, which is then analyzed by a multilinear dimensionality reduction technique and classified by a support vector machine (SVM). Generalization of the system to signals in high level of additive noise and reverberation is evaluated and compared to two existing approaches (Scheirer and Slaney, 2002 and Kingsbury et al., 2002). The results demonstrate the advantages of the auditory model over the other two systems, especially at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and high reverberation.

Content-based audio classification and segmentation by using support vector machines

Content-based audio classification and segmentation is a basis for further audio/video analysis. In this paper, we present our work on audio segmentation and classification which employs support vector machines (SVMs). Five audio classes are considered in this paper: silence, music, background sound, pure speech, and non- pure speech which includes speech over music and speech over noise. A sound stream is segmented by classifying each sub-segment into one of these five classes. We have evaluated the performance of SVM on different audio type-pairs classification with testing unit of different- length and compared the performance of SVM, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). We also evaluated the effectiveness of some new proposed features. Experiments on a database composed of about 4- hour audio data show that the proposed classifier is very efficient on audio classification and segmentation. It also shows the accuracy of the SVM-based method is much better than the method based on KNN and GMM.

Content-based audio classification and retrieval by support vector machines

Support vector machines (SVMs) have been recently proposed as a new learning algorithm for pattern recognition. In this paper, the SVMs with a binary tree recognition strategy are used to tackle the audio classification problem. We illustrate the potential of SVMs on a common audio database, which consists of 409 sounds of 16 classes. We compare the SVMs based classification with other popular approaches. For audio retrieval, we propose a new metric, called distance-from-boundary (DFB). When a query audio is given, the system first finds a boundary inside which the query pattern is located. Then, all the audio patterns in the database are sorted by their distances to this boundary. All boundaries are learned by the SVMs and stored together with the audio database. Experimental comparisons for audio retrieval are presented to show the superiority of this novel metric to other similarity measures.

Content-based audio classification and retrieval using a fuzzy logic system: towards multimedia search engines

In recent years, available audio corpora are rapidly increasing from fast growing Internet and digital libraries. How to classify and retrieve sound files relevant to the user's interest from large databases is crucial for building multimedia web search engines. In this paper, content-based technology has been applied to classify and retrieve audio clips using a fuzzy logic system, which is intuitive due to the fuzzy nature of human perception of audio, especially audio clips with mixed types. Two features selected from various extracted features are used as input to a constructed fuzzy inference system (FIS). The outputs of the FIS are two types of hierarchical audio classes. The membership functions and rules are derived from the distributions of extracted audio features. Speech and music can thus be discriminated by the FIS. Furthermore, female and male speech can be separated by another FIS, whereas percussion can be distinguished from other music instruments. In addition, we can use multiple FISs to form a “fuzzy tree” for retrieval of more types of audio clips. With this approach, we can classify and retrieve generic audios more accurately, using fewer features and less computation time, compared to other existing approaches.

Content-based audio classification and retrieval using the nearest feature line method

A method is presented for content-based audio classification and retrieval. It is based on a new pattern classification method called the nearest feature line (NFL). In the NFL, information provided by multiple prototypes per class is explored. This contrasts to the nearest neighbor (NN) classification in which the query is compared to each prototype individually. Regarding audio representation, perceptual and cepstral features and their combinations are considered. Extensive experiments are performed to compare various classification methods and feature sets. The results show that the NFL-based method produces consistently better results than the NN-based and other methods. A system resulting from this work has achieved the error rate of 9.78%, as compared to that of 18.34% of a compelling existing system, as tested on a common audio database.