Environment sound classification using a two-stream CNN based on decision-level fusion

With the popularity of using deep learning-based models in various categorization problems and their proven robustness compared to conventional methods, a growing number of researchers have exploited such methods in environment sound classification tasks in recent years. However, the performances of existing models use auditory features like log-mel spectrogram (LM) and mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), or raw waveform to train deep neural networks for environment sound classification (ESC) are unsatisfactory. In this paper, we first propose two combined features to give a more comprehensive representation of environment sounds Then, a fourfour-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) is presented to improve the performance of ESC with the proposed aggregated features. Finally, the CNN trained with different features are fused using the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory to compose TSCNN-DS model. The experiment results indicate that our combined features with the four-layer CNN are appropriate for environment sound taxonomic problems and dramatically outperform other conventional methods. The proposed TSCNN-DS model achieves a classification accuracy of 97.2%, which is the highest taxonomic accuracy on UrbanSound8K datasets compared to existing models.