RISC: A Corpus for Shout Type Classification and Shout Intensity Prediction

Abstract

The detection of shouted speech is crucial in audio surveillance and monitoring. Although it is desirable for a security system to be able to identify emergencies, existing corpora provide only a binary label (i.e., shouted or normal) for each speech sample, making it difficult to predict the shout intensity. Furthermore, most corpora comprise only utterances typical of hazardous situations, meaning that classifiers cannot learn to discriminate such utterances from shouts typical of less hazardous situations, such as cheers. Thus, this paper presents a novel research source, the RItsumeikan Shout Corpus (RISC), which contains wide variety types of shouted speech samples collected in recording experiments. Each shouted speech sample in RISC has a shout type and is also assigned shout intensity ratings via a crowdsourcing service. We also present a comprehensive performance comparison among deep learning approaches for speech type classification tasks and a shout intensity prediction task. The results show that feature learning based on the spectral and cepstral domains achieves high performance, no matter which network architecture is used. The results also demonstrate that shout type classification and intensity prediction are still challenging tasks, and RISC is expected to contribute to further development in this research area.