Towards Understanding of Frequency Dependence on Sound Event Detection

In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of two frequency-dependent methods for sound event detection (SED): FilterAugment and frequency dynamic convolution (FDY conv). The goal is to better understand their characteristics and behaviors in the context of SED. While SED has been rapidly advancing through the adoption of various deep learning techniques from other pattern recognition fields, such adopted techniques are often not suitable for SED. To address this issue, two frequency-dependent SED methods were previously proposed: FilterAugment, a data augmentation randomly weighting frequency bands, and FDY conv, an architecture applying frequency adaptive convolution kernels. These methods have demonstrated superior performance in SED, and we aim to further analyze their detailed effectiveness and characteristics in SED. We compare class-wise performance to find out specific pros and cons of FilterAugment and FDY conv. We apply Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), which highlights time-frequency region that is more inferred by the model, on SED models with and without frequency masking and two types of FilterAugment to observe their detailed characteristics. We propose simpler frequency dependent convolution methods and compare them with FDY conv to further understand which components of FDY conv affects SED performance. Lastly, we apply PCA to show how FDY conv adapts dynamic kernel across frequency dimensions on different sound event classes. The results and discussions demonstrate that frequency dependency plays a significant role in sound event detection and further confirms the effectiveness of frequency dependent methods on SED.