Domestic Activities Classification from Audio Recordings Using Multi-scale Dilated Depthwise Separable Convolutional Network

Abstract

Domestic activities classification (DAC) from audio recordings aims at classifying audio recordings into pre-defined categories of domestic activities, which is an effective way for estimation of daily activities performed in home environment. In this paper, we propose a method for DAC from audio recordings using a multi-scale dilated depthwise separable convolutional network (DSCN). The DSCN is a lightweight neural network with small size of parameters and thus suitable to be deployed in portable terminals with limited computing resources. To expand the receptive field with the same size of DSCN's parameters, dilated convolution, instead of normal convolution, is used in the DSCN for further improving the DSCN's performance. In addition, the embeddings of various scales learned by the dilated DSCN are concatenated as a multi-scale embedding for representing property differences among various classes of domestic activities. Evaluated on a public dataset of the Task 5 of the 2018 challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE-2018), the results show that: both dilated convolution and multi-scale embedding contribute to the performance improvement of the proposed method; and the proposed method outperforms the methods based on state-of-the-art lightweight network in terms of classification accuracy.