Paul Primus, Gerhard Widmer,
"On Frequency-Wise Normalizationsfor Better Recording Device Generalization in Audio SpectrogramTransformers"
: Proceedings of the 31st European SignalProcessing Conference (EUSIPCO 2023), 2023
Original Titel:
On Frequency-Wise Normalizationsfor Better Recording Device Generalization in Audio SpectrogramTransformers
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
Proceedings of the 31st European SignalProcessing Conference (EUSIPCO 2023)
Original Kurzfassung:
Varying conditions between the data seen at training and at application time remain a major challenge for machine learning. We study this problem in the context of Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) with mismatching recording devices.
Previous works successfully employed frequency-wise normalization of inputs and hidden layer activations in convolutional neural networks to reduce the recording device discrepancy. The main objective of this work was to adopt frequency-wise normalization for Audio Spectrogram
Transformers (ASTs), which have recently become the dominant model architecture in ASC. To this end, we first investigate how recording device characteristics are encoded in the hidden layer activations of ASTs. We find that recording device information is initially encoded in the
frequency dimension; however, after the first self-attention block, it is largely transformed into the token dimension. Based on this observation, we conjecture that suppressing recording device characteristics in the input spectrogram is the most effective. We propose a
frequency-centering operation for spectrograms that improves the ASC performance on unseen recording devices on average by up to 18.2 percentage points