General-purpose audio tagging from noisy labels using convolutional neural networks

General-purpose audio tagging refers to classifying sounds that are of a diverse nature, and is relevant in many applications where domain-specific information cannot be exploited. The DCASE 2018 challenge introduces Task 2 for this very problem. In this task, there are a large number of classes and the audio clips vary in duration. Moreover, a subset of the labels are noisy. In this paper, we propose a system to address these challenges. The basis of our system is an ensemble of convolutional neural networks trained on log-scaled mel spectrograms. We use preprocessing and data augmentation methods to improve the performance further. To reduce the effects of label noise, two techniques are proposed: loss function weighting and pseudo-labeling. Experiments on the private test set of this task show that our system achieves state-of-the-art performance with a mean average precision score of 0.95