Introduction
On this tutorial we’ll construct a deep studying mannequin to categorise phrases. We’ll use tfdatasets to deal with knowledge IO and pre-processing, and Keras to construct and prepare the mannequin.
We’ll use the Speech Instructions dataset which consists of 65,000 one-second audio information of individuals saying 30 totally different phrases. Every file incorporates a single spoken English phrase. The dataset was launched by Google beneath CC License.
Our mannequin is a Keras port of the TensorFlow tutorial on Easy Audio Recognition which in flip was impressed by Convolutional Neural Networks for Small-footprint Key phrase Recognizing. There are different approaches to the speech recognition activity, like recurrent neural networks, dilated (atrous) convolutions or Studying from Between-class Examples for Deep Sound Recognition.
The mannequin we’ll implement right here will not be the cutting-edge for audio recognition programs, that are far more advanced, however is comparatively easy and quick to coach. Plus, we present methods to effectively use tfdatasets to preprocess and serve knowledge.
Audio illustration
Many deep studying fashions are end-to-end, i.e. we let the mannequin be taught helpful representations instantly from the uncooked knowledge. Nevertheless, audio knowledge grows very quick – 16,000 samples per second with a really wealthy construction at many time-scales. As a way to keep away from having to take care of uncooked wave sound knowledge, researchers often use some sort of characteristic engineering.
Each sound wave will be represented by its spectrum, and digitally it may be computed utilizing the Quick Fourier Remodel (FFT).

A typical strategy to symbolize audio knowledge is to interrupt it into small chunks, which often overlap. For every chunk we use the FFT to calculate the magnitude of the frequency spectrum. The spectra are then mixed, aspect by aspect, to kind what we name a spectrogram.
It’s additionally frequent for speech recognition programs to additional rework the spectrum and compute the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients. This transformation takes into consideration that the human ear can’t discern the distinction between two carefully spaced frequencies and neatly creates bins on the frequency axis. An incredible tutorial on MFCCs will be discovered right here.

After this process, we’ve a picture for every audio pattern and we will use convolutional neural networks, the usual structure sort in picture recognition fashions.
Downloading
First, let’s obtain knowledge to a listing in our undertaking. You may both obtain from this hyperlink (~1GB) or from R with:
dir.create("knowledge")
obtain.file(
url = "http://obtain.tensorflow.org/knowledge/speech_commands_v0.01.tar.gz",
destfile = "knowledge/speech_commands_v0.01.tar.gz"
)
untar("knowledge/speech_commands_v0.01.tar.gz", exdir = "knowledge/speech_commands_v0.01")
Contained in the knowledge
listing we can have a folder known as speech_commands_v0.01
. The WAV audio information inside this listing are organised in sub-folders with the label names. For instance, all one-second audio information of individuals talking the phrase “mattress” are contained in the mattress
listing. There are 30 of them and a particular one known as _background_noise_
which incorporates numerous patterns that may very well be blended in to simulate background noise.
Importing
On this step we’ll listing all audio .wav information right into a tibble
with 3 columns:
fname
: the file identify;class
: the label for every audio file;class_id
: a singular integer quantity ranging from zero for every class – used to one-hot encode the courses.
This will likely be helpful to the following step once we will create a generator utilizing the tfdatasets
bundle.
Generator
We’ll now create our Dataset
, which within the context of tfdatasets
, provides operations to the TensorFlow graph to be able to learn and pre-process knowledge. Since they’re TensorFlow ops, they’re executed in C++ and in parallel with mannequin coaching.
The generator we’ll create will likely be answerable for studying the audio information from disk, creating the spectrogram for each and batching the outputs.
Let’s begin by creating the dataset from slices of the knowledge.body
with audio file names and courses we simply created.
Now, let’s outline the parameters for spectrogram creation. We have to outline window_size_ms
which is the scale in milliseconds of every chunk we’ll break the audio wave into, and window_stride_ms
, the gap between the facilities of adjoining chunks:
window_size_ms <- 30
window_stride_ms <- 10
Now we’ll convert the window dimension and stride from milliseconds to samples. We’re contemplating that our audio information have 16,000 samples per second (1000 ms).
window_size <- as.integer(16000*window_size_ms/1000)
stride <- as.integer(16000*window_stride_ms/1000)
We’ll acquire different portions that will likely be helpful for spectrogram creation, just like the variety of chunks and the FFT dimension, i.e., the variety of bins on the frequency axis. The perform we’re going to use to compute the spectrogram doesn’t permit us to vary the FFT dimension and as a substitute by default makes use of the primary energy of two higher than the window dimension.
We’ll now use dataset_map
which permits us to specify a pre-processing perform for every commentary (line) of our dataset. It’s on this step that we learn the uncooked audio file from disk and create its spectrogram and the one-hot encoded response vector.
# shortcuts to used TensorFlow modules.
audio_ops <- tf$contrib$framework$python$ops$audio_ops
ds <- ds %>%
dataset_map(perform(obs) {
# a great way to debug when constructing tfdatsets pipelines is to make use of a print
# assertion like this:
# print(str(obs))
# decoding wav information
audio_binary <- tf$read_file(tf$reshape(obs$fname, form = listing()))
wav <- audio_ops$decode_wav(audio_binary, desired_channels = 1)
# create the spectrogram
spectrogram <- audio_ops$audio_spectrogram(
wav$audio,
window_size = window_size,
stride = stride,
magnitude_squared = TRUE
)
# normalization
spectrogram <- tf$log(tf$abs(spectrogram) + 0.01)
# shifting channels to final dim
spectrogram <- tf$transpose(spectrogram, perm = c(1L, 2L, 0L))
# rework the class_id right into a one-hot encoded vector
response <- tf$one_hot(obs$class_id, 30L)
listing(spectrogram, response)
})
Now, we’ll specify how we wish batch observations from the dataset. We’re utilizing dataset_shuffle
since we need to shuffle observations from the dataset, in any other case it might comply with the order of the df
object. Then we use dataset_repeat
to be able to inform TensorFlow that we need to hold taking observations from the dataset even when all observations have already been used. And most significantly right here, we use dataset_padded_batch
to specify that we wish batches of dimension 32, however they need to be padded, ie. if some commentary has a distinct dimension we pad it with zeroes. The padded form is handed to dataset_padded_batch
through the padded_shapes
argument and we use NULL
to state that this dimension doesn’t should be padded.
That is our dataset specification, however we would wish to rewrite all of the code for the validation knowledge, so it’s good observe to wrap this right into a perform of the information and different vital parameters like window_size_ms
and window_stride_ms
. Under, we’ll outline a perform known as data_generator
that can create the generator relying on these inputs.
data_generator <- perform(df, batch_size, shuffle = TRUE,
window_size_ms = 30, window_stride_ms = 10) {
window_size <- as.integer(16000*window_size_ms/1000)
stride <- as.integer(16000*window_stride_ms/1000)
fft_size <- as.integer(2^trunc(log(window_size, 2)) + 1)
n_chunks <- size(seq(window_size/2, 16000 - window_size/2, stride))
ds <- tensor_slices_dataset(df)
if (shuffle)
ds <- ds %>% dataset_shuffle(buffer_size = 100)
ds <- ds %>%
dataset_map(perform(obs) {
# decoding wav information
audio_binary <- tf$read_file(tf$reshape(obs$fname, form = listing()))
wav <- audio_ops$decode_wav(audio_binary, desired_channels = 1)
# create the spectrogram
spectrogram <- audio_ops$audio_spectrogram(
wav$audio,
window_size = window_size,
stride = stride,
magnitude_squared = TRUE
)
spectrogram <- tf$log(tf$abs(spectrogram) + 0.01)
spectrogram <- tf$transpose(spectrogram, perm = c(1L, 2L, 0L))
# rework the class_id right into a one-hot encoded vector
response <- tf$one_hot(obs$class_id, 30L)
listing(spectrogram, response)
}) %>%
dataset_repeat()
ds <- ds %>%
dataset_padded_batch(batch_size, listing(form(n_chunks, fft_size, NULL), form(NULL)))
ds
}
Now, we will outline coaching and validation knowledge mills. It’s value noting that executing this received’t truly compute any spectrogram or learn any file. It should solely outline within the TensorFlow graph the way it ought to learn and pre-process knowledge.
set.seed(6)
id_train <- pattern(nrow(df), dimension = 0.7*nrow(df))
ds_train <- data_generator(
df[id_train,],
batch_size = 32,
window_size_ms = 30,
window_stride_ms = 10
)
ds_validation <- data_generator(
df[-id_train,],
batch_size = 32,
shuffle = FALSE,
window_size_ms = 30,
window_stride_ms = 10
)
To truly get a batch from the generator we might create a TensorFlow session and ask it to run the generator. For instance:
sess <- tf$Session()
batch <- next_batch(ds_train)
str(sess$run(batch))
Listing of two
$ : num [1:32, 1:98, 1:257, 1] -4.6 -4.6 -4.61 -4.6 -4.6 ...
$ : num [1:32, 1:30] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
Every time you run sess$run(batch)
you must see a distinct batch of observations.
Mannequin definition
Now that we all know how we’ll feed our knowledge we will concentrate on the mannequin definition. The spectrogram will be handled like a picture, so architectures which can be generally utilized in picture recognition duties ought to work properly with the spectrograms too.
We’ll construct a convolutional neural community much like what we’ve constructed right here for the MNIST dataset.
The enter dimension is outlined by the variety of chunks and the FFT dimension. Like we defined earlier, they are often obtained from the window_size_ms
and window_stride_ms
used to generate the spectrogram.
We’ll now outline our mannequin utilizing the Keras sequential API:
mannequin <- keras_model_sequential()
mannequin %>%
layer_conv_2d(input_shape = c(n_chunks, fft_size, 1),
filters = 32, kernel_size = c(3,3), activation = 'relu') %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_conv_2d(filters = 64, kernel_size = c(3,3), activation = 'relu') %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_conv_2d(filters = 128, kernel_size = c(3,3), activation = 'relu') %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_conv_2d(filters = 256, kernel_size = c(3,3), activation = 'relu') %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_dropout(fee = 0.25) %>%
layer_flatten() %>%
layer_dense(items = 128, activation = 'relu') %>%
layer_dropout(fee = 0.5) %>%
layer_dense(items = 30, activation = 'softmax')
We used 4 layers of convolutions mixed with max pooling layers to extract options from the spectrogram photos and a pair of dense layers on the high. Our community is relatively easy when in comparison with extra superior architectures like ResNet or DenseNet that carry out very properly on picture recognition duties.
Now let’s compile our mannequin. We’ll use categorical cross entropy because the loss perform and use the Adadelta optimizer. It’s additionally right here that we outline that we are going to have a look at the accuracy metric throughout coaching.
Mannequin becoming
Now, we’ll match our mannequin. In Keras we will use TensorFlow Datasets as inputs to the fit_generator
perform and we’ll do it right here.
Epoch 1/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 87s 62ms/step - loss: 2.0225 - acc: 0.4184 - val_loss: 0.7855 - val_acc: 0.7907
Epoch 2/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 75s 53ms/step - loss: 0.8781 - acc: 0.7432 - val_loss: 0.4522 - val_acc: 0.8704
Epoch 3/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 75s 53ms/step - loss: 0.6196 - acc: 0.8190 - val_loss: 0.3513 - val_acc: 0.9006
Epoch 4/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 75s 53ms/step - loss: 0.4958 - acc: 0.8543 - val_loss: 0.3130 - val_acc: 0.9117
Epoch 5/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 75s 53ms/step - loss: 0.4282 - acc: 0.8754 - val_loss: 0.2866 - val_acc: 0.9213
Epoch 6/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 76s 53ms/step - loss: 0.3852 - acc: 0.8885 - val_loss: 0.2732 - val_acc: 0.9252
Epoch 7/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 75s 53ms/step - loss: 0.3566 - acc: 0.8991 - val_loss: 0.2700 - val_acc: 0.9269
Epoch 8/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 76s 54ms/step - loss: 0.3364 - acc: 0.9045 - val_loss: 0.2573 - val_acc: 0.9284
Epoch 9/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 76s 53ms/step - loss: 0.3220 - acc: 0.9087 - val_loss: 0.2537 - val_acc: 0.9323
Epoch 10/10
1415/1415 [==============================] - 76s 54ms/step - loss: 0.2997 - acc: 0.9150 - val_loss: 0.2582 - val_acc: 0.9323
The mannequin’s accuracy is 93.23%. Let’s learn to make predictions and try the confusion matrix.
Making predictions
We will use thepredict_generator
perform to make predictions on a brand new dataset. Let’s make predictions for our validation dataset. The predict_generator
perform wants a step argument which is the variety of instances the generator will likely be known as.
We will calculate the variety of steps by realizing the batch dimension, and the scale of the validation dataset.
df_validation <- df[-id_train,]
n_steps <- nrow(df_validation)/32 + 1
We will then use the predict_generator
perform:
predictions <- predict_generator(
mannequin,
ds_validation,
steps = n_steps
)
str(predictions)
num [1:19424, 1:30] 1.22e-13 7.30e-19 5.29e-10 6.66e-22 1.12e-17 ...
It will output a matrix with 30 columns – one for every phrase and n_steps*batch_size variety of rows. Observe that it begins repeating the dataset on the finish to create a full batch.
We will compute the anticipated class by taking the column with the best chance, for instance.
courses <- apply(predictions, 1, which.max) - 1
A pleasant visualization of the confusion matrix is to create an alluvial diagram:
library(dplyr)
library(alluvial)
x <- df_validation %>%
mutate(pred_class_id = head(courses, nrow(df_validation))) %>%
left_join(
df_validation %>% distinct(class_id, class) %>% rename(pred_class = class),
by = c("pred_class_id" = "class_id")
) %>%
mutate(right = pred_class == class) %>%
depend(pred_class, class, right)
alluvial(
x %>% choose(class, pred_class),
freq = x$n,
col = ifelse(x$right, "lightblue", "purple"),
border = ifelse(x$right, "lightblue", "purple"),
alpha = 0.6,
disguise = x$n < 20
)

We will see from the diagram that probably the most related mistake our mannequin makes is to categorise “tree” as “three”. There are different frequent errors like classifying “go” as “no”, “up” as “off”. At 93% accuracy for 30 courses, and contemplating the errors we will say that this mannequin is fairly affordable.
The saved mannequin occupies 25Mb of disk area, which is affordable for a desktop however will not be on small gadgets. We might prepare a smaller mannequin, with fewer layers, and see how a lot the efficiency decreases.
In speech recognition duties its additionally frequent to do some sort of knowledge augmentation by mixing a background noise to the spoken audio, making it extra helpful for actual purposes the place it’s frequent to produce other irrelevant sounds taking place within the atmosphere.
The total code to breed this tutorial is accessible right here.