Title:  Audio Classification and Event Detection Based on Weakly Labeled Data

Committee: 

Dr. Anderson, Advisor

Dr. Davenport, Co-Advisor   

Dr. Moore, Chair

Dr. Dyer

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to perform audio event detection and classification using weakly labeled data. Although audio event detection has been studied for recent years, the research on this topic using weakly labeled data is limited. Many sources of multimedia data lack detailed annotation and rather have only high-level meta-data describing the main content of various long segments of the data. In this proposal we illustrate a novel framework to perform audio classification when working with such weakly labeled data. A traditional approach to this problem is to use techniques for strongly labeled data and then to deal with the weak nature of the labels via post-processing. In contrast, our approach directly addresses the weakly labeled aspect of the data by classifying longer windows of data based on the clustering behavior of the acoustic features over time. We evaluate the proposed framework using both synthetic datasets and real data and demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform the traditional approach.