No abstract

The ability to automatically recognize a wide range of sound events in real-world conditions is an important part of applications such as acoustic surveillance and machine hearing. Our approach takes inspiration from both audio and image processing fields, and is based on transforming the sound into a two-dimensional representation, then extracting an image feature for classification. This provided the motivation for our previous work on the spectrogram image feature (SIF). In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve the sound event classification performance in severe mismatched noise conditions. This is based on the subband power distribution (SPD) image-a novel two-dimensional representation that characterizes the spectral power distribution over time in each frequency subband. Here, the high-powered reliable elements of the spectrogram are transformed to a localized region of the SPD, hence can be easily separated from the noise. We then extract an image feature from the SPD, using the same approach as for the SIF, and develop a novel missing feature classification approach based on a nearest neighbor classifier ( NN). We carry out comprehensive experiments on a database of 50 environmental sound classes over a range of challenging noise conditions. The results demonstrate that the SPD-IF is both discriminative over the broad range of sound classes, and robust in severe non-stationary noise.Index Terms-Sound event classification, subband power distribution (SPD), spectrogram, missing feature theory.

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), answers have a great correlation with question meaning and visual contents. Thus, to selectively utilize image, question and answer information, we propose a novel trilinear interaction model which simultaneously learns high level associations between these three inputs. In addition, to overcome the interaction complexity, we introduce a multimodal tensor-based PARALIND decomposition which efficiently parameterizes trilinear interaction between the three inputs. Moreover, knowledge distillation is first time applied in Free-form Opened-ended VQA. It is not only for reducing the computational cost and required memory but also for transferring knowledge from trilinear interaction model to bilinear interaction model. The extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets TDIUC, VQA-2.0, and Visual7W show that the proposed compact trilinear interaction model achieves state-of-the-art results when using a single model on all three datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/aioz-ai/ICCV19_