Classification of audio signals using spectrogram surfaces and extrinsic distortion measures

Representation of one-dimensional (1D) signals as surfaces and higher-dimensional manifolds reveals geometric structures that can enhance assessment of signal similarity and classification of large sets of signals. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel robust algorithm for extraction of geometric features, by mapping the obtained geometric objects into a reference domain. This yields a set of highly descriptive features that are instrumental in feature engineering and in analysis of 1D signals. Two examples illustrate applications of our approach to well-structured audio signals: Lung sounds were chosen because of the interest in respiratory pathologies caused by the coronavirus and environmental conditions; accent detection was selected as a challenging speech analysis problem. Our approach outperformed baseline models under all measured metrics. It can be further extended by considering higher-dimensional distortion measures. We provide access to the code for those who are interested in other applications and different setups (Code: https://github.com/jeremy-levy/Classification-of-audio-signals-using-spectrogram-surfaces-and-extrinsic-distortion-measures). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13634-022-00933-9.