Animal sound classification (ASC) refers to the automatic identification of animal categories by sound, and is useful for monitoring rare or elusive wildlife. Thus far, deep-learning-based models have shown good performance in ASC when training data is sufficient, but suffer from severe performance degradation if not. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown the potential to solve this problem by generating virtual data. However, in a multi-class environment, existing GAN-based methods need to construct separate generative models for each class. Additionally, they only consider the waveform or spectrogram of sound, resulting in poor quality of the generated sound. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a two-step sound augmentation scheme using a class-conditional GAN. First, common features are learned from all classes of animal sounds, and multiple classes of animal sounds are generated based on the features that consider both waveforms and spectrograms using class-conditional GAN. Second, we select data from the generated data based on the confidence of the pretrained ASC model to improve classification performance. Through experiments, we show that the proposed method improves the accuracy of the basic ASC model by up to 18.3%, which corresponds to a performance improvement of 13.4% compared to the second-best augmentation method.
Keywords: GAN; animal sound classification; data augmentation; deep learning.