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arXiv · 2610.34931

A Hierarchical Method for Environmental Sounds Recognition in Complex Acoustic Scenes

Zhouwen Li·Haijun Lin·Bowen Lv·Yupeng Chen
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Abstract

Environmental noise identification is essential for noise control, yet conventional single-stage classifiers suffer from class confusion under imbalanced multiclass conditions. This paper proposes a lightweight hierarchical model integrating a Frequency-Time Adaptive Network (FTANet) with a two-stage classification mechanism. FTANet employs parallel asymmetric one-dimensional convolutions to capture temporal dynamics and frequency-band distributions, while adaptive fusion attention (AFA) enhances discriminative acoustic features. In the first stage, FTANet classifies sounds into five coarse-grained categories covering 25 fine-grained classes. In the second stage, samples are routed to the corresponding category-specific classifiers for fine-grained recognition. On a self-constructed dataset, FTANet achieves 95.45% coarse-grained accuracy with only 0.2004M parameters. On UrbanSound8K, it achieves 79.24% mean accuracy and 80.37% mean F1-score in ten-fold evaluation, outperforming compared convolutional models. Field tests on the Tianjin Online Acoustic Environment Monitoring Platform yield 87.94% coarse-grained accuracy and 97.21% conditional fine-grained accuracy for natural sounds correctly routed to C2. The complete hierarchical model achieves 87.18% overall accuracy and 87.40% weighted-average F1-score, demonstrating its feasibility for urban environmental noise monitoring.

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BibTeXRIS

Zhouwen Li, Haijun Lin, Bowen Lv, Yupeng Chen. 2026-10-26. A Hierarchical Method for Environmental Sounds Recognition in Complex Acoustic Scenes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34931

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