Weakly labeled sound event detection with a capsule-transformer model

Sound event detection (SED) is a widely studied field that has achieved considerable success. The dynamic routing mechanism of capsule networks has been used for SED, but its performance in capturing global information of audio is still limited. In this paper, we propose a method for SED that by combining the capsule network with transformer leverages the strength of transformer in capturing global features with that of capsule network in capturing local features. The proposed method was evaluated on the DCASE 2017 Task 4 weakly labeled dataset. The obtained F-score and Equal Error Rate are 60.6% and 0.75, respectively. Compared to other baseline systems, our method achieves significantly improved performance. Keywords: Sound event detection, audio tagging, gated convolution, transformer, capsule network.