Self-Supervised Feature Learning of 1D Convolutional Neural Networks with Contrastive Loss for Eating Detection Using an In-Ear Microphone

The importance of automated and objective monitoring of dietary behavior is becoming increasingly accepted. The advancements in sensor technology along with recent achievements in machine-learning–based signal-processing algorithms have enabled the development of dietary monitoring solutions that yield highly accurate results. A common bottleneck for developing and training machine learning algorithms is obtaining labeled data for training supervised algorithms, and in particular ground truth annotations. Manual ground truth annotation is laborious, cumbersome, can sometimes introduce errors, and is sometimes impossible in free-living data collection. As a result, there is a need to decrease the labeled data required for training. Additionally, unlabeled data, gathered in-the-wild from existing wearables (such as Bluetooth earbuds) can be used to train and fine-tune eating-detection models. In this work, we focus on training a feature extractor for audio signals captured by an in-ear microphone for the task of eating detection in a self-supervised way. We base our approach on the SimCLR method for image classification, proposed by Chen et al. from the domain of computer vision. Results are promising as our self-supervised method achieves similar results to supervised training alternatives, and its overall effectiveness is comparable to current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mug-auth/ssl-chewing.