CnnSound: Convolutional Neural Networks for the Classification of Environmental Sounds

The classification of environmental sounds (ESC) has been increasingly studied in recent years. The main reason is that environmental sounds are part of our daily life, and associating them with our environment that we live in is important in several aspects as ESC is used in areas such as managing smart cities, determining location from environmental sounds, surveillance systems, machine hearing, environment monitoring. The ESC is however more difficult than other sounds because there are too many parameters that generate background noise in the ESC, which makes the sound more difficult to model and classify. The main aim of this study is therefore to develop more robust convolution neural networks architecture (CNN). For this purpose, 150 different CNN-based models were designed by changing the number of layers and values of their tuning parameters used in the layers. In order to test the accuracy of the models, the Urbansound8k environmental sound database was used. The sounds in this data set were first converted into an image format of 32x32x3. The proposed CNN model has yielded an accuracy of as much as 82.5% being higher than its classical counterpart. As there was not that much fine-tuning, the obtained accuracy has been found to be better and satisfactory compared to other studies on the Urbansound8k when both accuracy and computational complexity are considered. The results also suggest further improvement possible due to low complexity of the proposed CNN architecture and its applicability in real-world settings.