This thesis focuses on dealing with the task of acoustic scene classification (ASC), and then applied the techniques developed for ASC to a real-life application of detecting respiratory disease. To deal with ASC challenges, this thesis addresses three main factors that directly affect the performance of an ASC system. Firstly, this thesis explores input features by making use of multiple spectrograms (log-mel, Gamma, and CQT) for low-level feature extraction to tackle the issue of insufficiently discriminative or descriptive input features. Next, a novel Encoder network architecture is introduced. The Encoder firstly transforms each low-level spectrogram into high-level intermediate features, or embeddings, and thus combines these high-level features to form a very distinct composite feature. The composite or combined feature is then explored in terms of classification performance, with different Decoders such as Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perception (MLP), and Mixture of Experts (MoE). By using this Encoder-Decoder framework, it helps to reduce the computation cost of the reference process in ASC systems which make use of multiple spectrogram inputs. Since the proposed techniques applied for general ASC tasks were shown to be highly effective, this inspired an application to a specific real-life application. This was namely the 2017 Internal Conference on Biomedical Health Informatics (ICBHI) respiratory sound dataset. Building upon the proposed ASC framework, the ICBHI tasks were tackled with a deep learning framework, and the resulting system shown to be capable at detecting respiratory anomaly cycles and diseases.
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