Sound event detection (SED) and acoustic scene classification (ASC) are major tasks in environmental sound analysis. Considering that sound events and scenes are closely related to each other, some works have addressed joint analyses of sound events and acoustic scenes based on multitask learning (MTL), in which the knowledge of sound events and scenes can help in estimating them mutually. The conventional MTL-based methods utilize one-hot scene labels to train the relationship between sound events and scenes; thus, the conventional methods cannot model the extent to which sound events and scenes are related. However, in the real environment, common sound events may occur in some acoustic scenes; on the other hand, some sound events occur only in a limited acoustic scene. In this paper, we thus propose a new method for SED based on MTL of SED and ASC using the soft labels of acoustic scenes, which enable us to model the extent to which sound events and scenes are related. Experiments conducted using TUT Sound Events 2016/2017 and TUT Acoustic Scenes 2016 datasets show that the proposed method improves the SED performance by 3.80% in F-score compared with conventional MTL-based SED.

Acoustic event detection and scene classification are major research tasks in environmental sound analysis, and many methods based on neural networks have been proposed. Conventional methods have addressed these tasks separately; however, acoustic events and scenes are closely related to each other. For example, in the acoustic scene "office", the acoustic events "mouse clicking" and "keyboard typing" are likely to occur. In this paper, we propose multitask learning for joint analysis of acoustic events and scenes, which shares the parts of the networks holding information on acoustic events and scenes in common. By integrating the two networks, we expect that information on acoustic scenes will improve the performance of acoustic event detection. Experimental results obtained using TUT Sound Events 2016/2017 and TUT Acoustic Scenes 2016 datasets indicate that the proposed method improves the performance of acoustic event detection by 10.66 percentage points in terms of the F-score, compared with a conventional method based on a convolutional recurrent neural network.

Sound event detection (SED) and acoustic scene classification (ASC) are important research topics in environmental sound analysis. Many research groups have addressed SED and ASC using neural-network-based methods, such as the convolutional neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN), and convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN). The conventional methods address SED and ASC separately even though sound events and acoustic scenes are closely related to each other. For example, in the acoustic scene "office," the sound events "mouse clicking" and "keyboard typing" are likely to occur. Therefore, it is expected that information on sound events and acoustic scenes will be of mutual aid for SED and ASC. In this paper, we propose multitask learning for joint analysis of sound events and acoustic scenes, in which the parts of the networks holding information on sound events and acoustic scenes in common are shared. Experimental results obtained using the TUT Sound Events 2016/2017 and TUT Acoustic Scenes 2016 datasets indicate that the proposed method improves the performance of SED and ASC by 1.31 and 1.80 percentage points in terms of the F-score, respectively, compared with the conventional CRNN-based method.

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