SpectNet : End-to-End Audio Signal Classification Using Learnable Spectrograms

Pattern recognition from audio signals is an active research topic encompassing audio tagging, acoustic scene classification, music classification, and other areas. Spectrogram and mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are among the most commonly used features for audio signal analysis and classification. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been successfully used for audio classification problems using spectrogram-based 2D features. In this paper, we present SpectNet, an integrated front-end layer that extracts spectrogram features within a CNN architecture that can be used for audio pattern recognition tasks. The front-end layer utilizes learnable gammatone filters that are initialized using mel-scale filters. The proposed layer outputs a 2D spectrogram image which can be fed into a 2D CNN for classification. The parameters of the entire network, including the front-end filterbank, can be updated via back-propagation. This training scheme allows for fine-tuning the spectrogram-image features according to the target audio dataset. The proposed method is evaluated in two different audio signal classification tasks: heart sound anomaly detection and acoustic scene classification. The proposed method shows a significant 1.02\% improvement in MACC for the heart sound classification task and 2.11\% improvement in accuracy for the acoustic scene classification task compared to the classical spectrogram image features. The source code of our experiments can be found at \url{https://github.com/mHealthBuet/SpectNet}

Heart Sound Classification Considering Additive Noise and Convolutional Distortion

Cardiac auscultation is an essential point-of-care method used for the early diagnosis of heart diseases. Automatic analysis of heart sounds for abnormality detection is faced with the challenges of additive noise and sensor-dependent degradation. This paper aims to develop methods to address the cardiac abnormality detection problem when both types of distortions are present in the cardiac auscultation sound. We first mathematically analyze the effect of additive and convolutional noise on short-term filterbank-based features and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) layer. Based on the analysis, we propose a combination of linear and logarithmic spectrogram-image features. These 2D features are provided as input to a residual CNN network (ResNet) for heart sound abnormality detection. Experimental validation is performed on an open-access heart sound abnormality detection dataset involving noisy recordings obtained from multiple stethoscope sensors. The proposed method achieves significantly improved results compared to the conventional approaches, with an area under the ROC (receiver operating characteristics) curve (AUC) of 91.36%, F-1 score of 84.09%, and Macc (mean of sensitivity and specificity) of 85.08%. We also show that the proposed method shows the best mean accuracy across different source domains including stethoscope and noise variability, demonstrating its effectiveness in different recording conditions. The proposed combination of linear and logarithmic features along with the ResNet classifier effectively minimizes the impact of background noise and sensor variability for classifying phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. The proposed method paves the way towards developing computer-aided cardiac auscultation systems in noisy environments using low-cost stethoscopes.