Title
Impact of Acoustic Event Tagging on Scene Classification in a Multi-Task Learning Framework
Abstract
Acoustic events are sounds with well-defined spectro-temporal characteristics which can be associated with the physical objects generating them. Acoustic scenes are collections of such acoustic events in no specific temporal order. Given this natural linkage between events and scenes, a common belief is that the ability to classify events must help in the classification of scenes. This has led to several efforts attempting to do well on Acoustic Event Tagging (AET) and Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) using a multi-task network. However, in these efforts, improvement in one task does not guarantee an improvement in the other, suggesting a tension between ASC and AET. It is unclear if improvements in AET translates to improvements in ASC. We explore this conundrum through an extensive empirical study and show that under certain conditions, using AET as an auxiliary task in the multi-task network consistently improves ASC performance. Additionally, ASC performance further improves with the AET data-set size and is not sensitive to the choice of events or the number of events in the AET data-set. We conclude that this improvement in ASC performance comes from the regularization effect of using AET and not from the network's improved ability to discern between acoustic events.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.21437/INTERSPEECH.2022-10905
Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH)
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rahil Parikh101.35
Harshavardhan Sundar200.68
Ming Sun39116.25
Chao Wang4895190.04
Spyros Matsoukas500.68