Domestic Activity Clustering from Audio via Depthwise Separable Convolutional Autoencoder Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deep learning approach using a depthwise separable convolutional autoencoder for unsupervised clustering of domestic activities from audio, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

The study proposes a new clustering method with a specialized autoencoder and clustering loss, achieving better results with lower computational complexity.

Findings

Achieved NMI of 54.46% and CA of 63.64% on a public dataset.

Outperformed state-of-the-art methods in clustering accuracy and mutual information.

Reduced computational complexity and memory usage compared to previous deep models.

Abstract

Automatic estimation of domestic activities from audio can be used to solve many problems, such as reducing the labor cost for nursing the elderly people. This study focuses on solving the problem of domestic activity clustering from audio. The target of domestic activity clustering is to cluster audio clips which belong to the same category of domestic activity into one cluster in an unsupervised way. In this paper, we propose a method of domestic activity clustering using a depthwise separable convolutional autoencoder network. In the proposed method, initial embeddings are learned by the depthwise separable convolutional autoencoder, and a clustering-oriented loss is designed to jointly optimize embedding refinement and cluster assignment. Different methods are evaluated on a public dataset (a derivative of the SINS dataset) used in the challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) in 2018. Our method obtains the normalized mutual information (NMI) score of 54.46%, and the clustering accuracy (CA) score of 63.64%, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of NMI and CA. In addition, both computational complexity and memory requirement of our method is lower than that of previous deep-model-based methods. Codes: https://github.com/vinceasvp/domestic-activity-clustering-from-audio