TimeScaleNet: A Multiresolution Approach for Raw Audio Recognition Using Learnable Biquadratic IIR Filters and Residual Networks of Depthwise-Separable One-Dimensional Atrous Convolutions

In this paper, we show the benefit of a multi-resolution approach that allows us to encode the relevant information contained in unprocessed time-domain acoustic signals. TimeScaleNet aims at learning an efficient representation of a sound, by learning time dependencies both at the sample level and at the frame level. The proposed approach allows us to improve the interpretability of the learning scheme, by unifying advanced deep learning and signal processing techniques. In particular, TimeScaleNet's architecture introduces a new form of recurrent neural layer, which is directly inspired from digital infinite impulse-response (IIR) signal processing. This layer acts as a learnable passband biquadratic digital IIR filterbank. The learnable filterbank allows us to build a time-frequency-like feature map that self-adapts to the specific recognition task and dataset, with a large receptive field and very few learnable parameters. The obtained frame-level feature map is then processed using a residual network of depthwise separable atrous convolutions. This second scale of analysis aims at efficiently encoding relationships between the time fluctuations at the frame timescale, in different learnt pooled frequency bands, in the range of [20 ms ; 200 ms]. TimeScaleNet is tested both using the Speech Commands Dataset and the ESC-10 Dataset. We report a high mean accuracy of $94.87 \pm 0.24 \%$ (macro averaged F1-score : $94.9 \pm 0.24 \%$ ) for speech recognition, and a rather moderate accuracy of $69.71 \pm 1.91 \%$ (macro averaged F1-score : $70.14 \pm 1.57 \%$ ) for the environmental sound classification task.