Convolving Gaussian Kernels for RNN-Based Beat Tracking

Because of an ability of modelling context information, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) or bi-directional RNNs (BRNNs) have been used for beat tracking with good performance. However, there are two problems associated with RNN-based beat tracking. The first problem is the imbalanced data: usually only around 2% frames are labelled as 'beat'. The second one is the disagreement on the precise positions of beats in human annotations or the delay of annotations caused by human tapping. In order to tackle these problems, we propose to convolve the original ground truth with a Gaussian kernel as the target output of the network for a more robust training. We conduct a comparison experiment using five different Gaussian kernels on five individual datasets. The results on the validation sets show that we can train a better or at least competitive model in a shorter time by using the convolved ground truth with a proper Gaussian kernel.