Urban Sound Classification using Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network

Environmental sound classification has received more attention in recent years. Analysis of environmental sounds is difficult because of its unstructured nature. However, the presence of strong spectro-temporal patterns makes the classification possible. Since LSTM neural networks are efficient at learning temporal dependencies we propose and examine a LSTM model for urban sound classification. The model is trained on magnitude mel-spectrograms extracted from UrbanSound8K dataset audio. The proposed network is evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation and compared with the baseline CNN. It is shown that the LSTM model outperforms a set of existing solutions and is more accurate and confident than the CNN.