Receptive-field-regularized CNN variants for acoustic scene classification

Acoustic scene classification and related tasks have been dominated by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Top-performing CNNs use mainly audio spectograms as input and borrow their architectural design primarily from computer vision. A recent study has shown that restricting the receptive field (RF) of CNNs in appropriate ways is crucial for their performance, robustness and generalization in audio tasks. One side effect of restricting the RF of CNNs is that more frequency information is lost. In this paper, we perform a systematic investigation of different RF configuration for various CNN architectures on the DCASE 2019 Task 1.A dataset. Second, we introduce Frequency Aware CNNs to compensate for the lack of frequency information caused by the restricted RF, and experimentally determine if and in what RF ranges they yield additional improvement. The result of these investigations are several well-performing submissions to different tasks in the DCASE 2019 Challenge.