Deep Belief Network based audio classification for construction sites monitoring

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2021-09, Vol.177, p.114839, Article 114839
• Main Authors: Scarpiniti, Michele, Colasante, Francesco, Di Tanna, Simone, Ciancia, Marco, Lee, Yong-Cheol, Uncini, Aurelio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Audio processing; Audio signals; Belief networks; Construction equipment; Construction monitoring; Construction sites; Deep Belief Network (DBN); Deep learning; Environmental sound classification; Feature extraction; Monitoring; Signal classification
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2021.114839

•High-performance of deep belief networks for environmental sound classification.•Audio-based classification of construction equipment and tools.•Audio-based and unmanned monitoring of construction sites. In this paper, we propose a Deep Belief Network (DBN) based approach for the classification of audio signals to improve work activity identification and remote surveillance of construction projects. The aim of the work is to obtain an accurate and flexible tool for consistently executing and managing the unmanned monitoring of construction sites by using distributed acoustic sensors. In this paper, ten classes of multiple construction equipment and tools, frequently and broadly used in construction sites, have been collected and examined to conduct and validate the proposed approach. The input provided to the DBN consists in the concatenation of several statistics evaluated by a set of spectral features, like MFCCs and mel-scaled spectrogram. The proposed architecture, along with the preprocessing and the feature extraction steps, has been described in details while the effectiveness of the proposed idea has been demonstrated by some numerical results, evaluated by using real-world recordings. The final overall accuracy on the test set is up to 98% and is a significantly improved performance compared to other state-of-the-are approaches. A practical and real-time application of the presented method has been also proposed in order to apply the classification scheme to sound data recorded in different environmental scenarios.