Classification of known and unknown environmental sounds based on self-organized space using a recurrent neural network

Our goal is to develop a system to learn and classify environmental sounds for robots working in the real world. In the real world, two main restrictions pertain in learning. (i) Robots have to learn using only a small amount of data in a limited time because of hardware restrictions. (ii) The system has to adapt to unknown data since it is virtually impossible to collect samples of all environmental sounds. We used a neuro-dynamical model to build a prediction and classification system. This neuro-dynamical model can self-organize sound classes into parameters by learning samples. The sound classification space, constructed by these parameters, is structured for the sound generation dynamics and obtains clusters not only for known classes, but also unknown classes. The proposed system searches on the basis of the sound classification space for classifying. In the experiment, we evaluated the accuracy of classification for both known and unknown sound classes.