Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Mixup for Environmental Sound Classification

Environmental sound classification (ESC) is an important and challenging problem. In contrast to speech, sound events have noise like nature and may be produced by a wide variety of sources. In this paper, we propose to use a novel deep convolutional neural network for ESC tasks. Our network architecture uses stacked convolutional and pooling layers to extract high-level feature representations from spectrogram-like features. Furthermore, we apply mixup to ESC tasks and explore its impacts on classification performance and feature distribution. Experiments were conducted on UrbanSound8K, ESC-50 and ESC-10 datasets. Our experimental results demonstrated that our ESC system has achieved the state-of-the-art performance (83.7%) on UrbanSound8K and competitive performance on ESC-50 and ESC-10.