Stella X. Yu : Papers / Google Scholar

Unsupervised Discriminative Learning of Sounds for Audio Event Classification
Sascha Hornauer and Ke Li and Stella X. Yu and Shabnam Ghaffarzadegan and Liu Ren
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Online, 6-11 June 2021
Paper | Slides | arXiv

Abstract
Recent progress in network-based audio event classification has shown the benefit of pre-training models on visual data such as ImageNet. While this process allows knowledge transfer across different domains, training a model on large-scale visual datasets is time consuming. On several audio event classification benchmarks, we show a fast and effective alternative that pre-trains the model unsupervised, only on audio data and yet delivers on-par performance with ImageNet pre-training. Furthermore, we show that our discriminative audio learning can be used to transfer knowledge across audio datasets and optionally include ImageNet pre-training.

Keywords
audio event classification, unsupervised representation learning