At the 9th Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) Challenge 2024, held recently in Tokyo, the Intelligent Signal Processing Group from the College of Computer Science and Technology at Harbin Engineering University (HEU), led by Associate Professor GUAN Jian, received the prestigious Judges' Award. This recognition highlights the team’s innovative solutions in Task 10 of the challenge, focused on acoustic-based traffic monitoring.
The team includes Associate Professor GUAN Jian and graduate students FAN Shitong and XIAO Feiyang from HEU, as well as Professor WANG Wenwu from the Visual Speech Signal Processing Center at the University of Surrey, UK, and Dr. ZHU Qiaoxi from the Acoustic Laboratory at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Their proposed solution utilizes a fine-grained audio feature representation with a pretrained model and Graph Attention for traffic flow monitoring.
This approach enhances audio feature representation through model pretraining and employs graph attention to establish contextual connections between audio signals. By capturing key sound events, the method significantly improves the performance of traffic monitoring systems. The team’s innovative solution not only earned them the championship in Task 10 but also the highly coveted Judges' Award.
The Judges' Award is presented annually by a panel of international experts in voice recognition during the DCASE Challenge. It celebrates the most outstanding and innovative theories and methods in sound recognition. Organized by the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Technical Committee, DCASE is recognized as the leading global competition in sound recognition, dedicated to advancing solutions for real-world sound perception challenges. The challenge, now in its 10th consecutive year, attracts top-tier academic and industry teams worldwide.
Previous participants have included elite acoustic research teams from universities such as Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, ETH Zurich, Nanyang Technological University, ITMO University, Tsinghua University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, as well as global tech leaders like Google, Samsung, Bosch, NTT, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, iFlytek, Xiaomi, and Huawei.
