arXiv Machine Learning

A Hierarchical Method for Environmental Sounds Recognition in Complex Acoustic Scenes

The paper introduces a lightweight hierarchical model for environmental sound recognition that combines a Frequency-Time Adaptive Network (FTANet) with a two-stage classification process. FTANet uses parallel asymmetric 1‑D convolutions and adaptive fusion attention to extract temporal and frequency‑band features, first classifying sounds into five coarse categories and then routing them to fine‑grained classifiers. The model achieves high accuracy on a self‑constructed dataset, UrbanSound8K, and real‑world field tests, demonstrating its effectiveness for urban noise monitoring.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

CoarseSoundNet: Building a reliable model for ecological soundscape analysis

CoarseSoundNet is a deep learning framework designed to classify ecological soundscapes into biophony, geophony, and anthropophony under realistic passive acoustic monitoring conditions. The study systematically explores model architectures, training data composition, and evaluation strategies, finding that adding more domain‑similar data, a silence class, and post‑hoc calibration improves performance. An ecological case study shows that pre‑filtering recordings with CoarseSoundNet produces acoustic index trends similar to ground‑truth filtering, though the impact on avian alpha‑diversity relationships is modest.

By Alexander Gebhard, Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Dominik Arend, Sandra M\"uller, Svenja Schmidt, Michael Scherer-Lorenzen, Bj\"orn W. Schuller
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

"What's That Sound?": A Versatile, Robust, and Lightweight Convolutional Transformer for Environment Sound Recognition

The paper introduces RALCT, a lightweight Convolutional Transformer that combines randomized audio augmentations, MFCCs, and log‑mel spectrograms to extract robust features for environmental sound recognition. With only about 310,000 parameters, RALCT achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy—over 93% on UrbanSound8K, peaking at 94.56%—making it suitable for deployment on mobile devices. The authors also develop a mobile app that integrates the model to provide real‑time safety alerts for hearing‑impaired users.

By Julia Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

LAST: Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer

The paper introduces LAST, a Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer that processes all tokens once and then reuses the same blocks to refine only the class token over fixed audio features, making subsequent passes inexpensive. On AudioSet, a ten‑pass LAST outperforms a twelve‑layer sequential transformer by 2.1% relative mean average precision while using 49.4% fewer parameters, 42% fewer MACs, and achieving 9.8% higher throughput. Increasing the pass count from two to ten improves accuracy with only a 1.2% increase in computation, and the model shows enhanced robustness to temporal masking and other auditory augmentations across music, environmental, and event sound classification tasks.

By Haider Al-Tahan, Sean O'Brien, Anastasia Razdaibiedina, N. Apurva Ratan Murty
arXiv AI
Jun 2

DAStatFormer: A Hybrid Multibranch Transformer with Statistical Feature Integration for DAS-Based Pattern Recognitions

arXiv:2606. 00081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) enables large-scale monitoring through optical fibers, but its high dimensionality and complex spatio-temporal patterns make event classification demanding.

By Michel Dione (CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe), Jerry Lonlac (CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe), H\'el\`ene Louis (CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe), Anthony Fleury (CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe), Stephane Lecoeuche
arXiv AI
Sep 10

AudioFuse: Unified Spectral-Temporal Learning via a Hybrid ViT-1D CNN Architecture for Robust Phonocardiogram Classification

AudioFuse is a hybrid architecture that jointly learns from spectrograms and raw waveforms to classify phonocardiograms. It combines a wide-and-shallow Vision Transformer for spectral features with a shallow 1D CNN for temporal waveforms, reducing overfitting while capturing complementary information. On the PhysioNet 2016 dataset, AudioFuse achieves a state‑of‑the‑art ROC‑AUC of 0.8608 and shows superior robustness to domain shift on the PASCAL dataset, outperforming both spectrogram‑only and waveform‑only baselines.

By Md. Saiful Bari Siddiqui, Utsab Saha
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Towards Deployable Underwater Vessel Classification

The paper presents a compact underwater acoustic classification framework that integrates multi-representation feature engineering, temporal statistical pooling, and lightweight convolutional architectures for acoustic time-frequency and cochlear representations. Experiments on the ShipsEar dataset show a two-layer CNN achieving a macro F1 of 0.9918 and an RBF-SVM reaching 0.9883, but recording provenance issues limit verification of generalisation. When evaluated on the DeepShip dataset with recording-level partitioning, a 157K-parameter CNN attains a macro F1 of 0.7226, while a larger ResNet18 does not improve validation performance, underscoring the need for representation-aware design and rigorous evaluation for deployable systems.

By Abishek Soti, Thura Pyae Sone, Naqib Ibnul, Htoo Htet Aung, Henry Zhong, Gregory Cohen, Ying Xu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Efficient Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Killer Whales Using a Two-Stage Detection and Ecotype Classification Cascade

The paper presents a lightweight ResNet-based two-stage cascade for passive acoustic monitoring of killer whales. First, it detects vocalizations, then it classifies confident detections into five eastern North Pacific ecotypes, abstaining on ambiguous calls. The pipeline achieves high macro‑F1 scores on the DCLDE 2027 dataset and improves real‑time inference speed, while active learning adapts the detector to new acoustic environments.

By Daniela Ruiz, Manuel Castellote, Zhongqi Miao, Carl Chalmers, Bruno Demuro, Rahul Dodhia, Pablo Arbelaez, Juan M. Lavista