Clustering by Errors: A Self-Organized Multitask Learning Method for Acoustic Scene Classification

Acoustic scene classification (ASC) tries to inference information about the environment using audio segments. The inter-class similarity is a significant issue in ASC as acoustic scenes with different labels may sound quite similar. In this paper, the similarity relations amongst scenes are correlated with the classification error. A class hierarchy construction method by using classification error is then proposed and integrated into a multitask learning framework. The experiments have shown that the proposed multitask learning method improves the performance of ASC. On the TUT Acoustic Scene 2017 dataset, we obtain the ensemble fine-grained accuracy of 81.4%, which is better than the state-of-the-art. By using multitask learning, the basic Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model can be improved by about 2.0 to 3.5 percent according to different spectrograms. The coarse category accuracies (for two to six super-classes) range from 77.0% to 96.2% by single models. On the revised version of the LITIS Rouen dataset, we achieve the ensemble fine-grained accuracy of 83.9%. The multitask learning models obtain an improvement of 1.6% to 1.8% compared to their basic models. The coarse category accuracies range from 94.9% to 97.9% for two to six super-classes with single models.