AWtoolbox: Characterizing Audio Information Using Audio Words

Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Ping-Keng Jao, Yi-Hsuan Yang

Abstract: This paper presents the AWtoolbox, an open-source software designed for extracting the audio word (AW) representation of audio signals. The toolbox comes with a graphical user interface that helps a user design custom AW extraction pipelines and various algorithms for feature encoding, dictionary learning, result rectification, pooling, normalization and others. This paper also reports a benchmark comparing eight AW representations computed by the toolbox against state-of-the-art low-level and mid-level timbre, rhythmic and tonal descriptors of music and sound. The evaluation result shows that sparse coding (SC) based AW representation leads to very competitive performances across the three tested sound and music classification tasks. AWtoolbox is available for download at http://mac.citi.sinica.edu.tw/awtoolbox.