Multi-agent Auditory Scene Analysis

Auditory scene analysis (ASA) aims to retrieve information from the acoustic environment, by carrying out three main tasks: sound source location, separation, and classification. These tasks are traditionally executed with a linear data flow, where the sound sources are first located; then, using their location, each source is separated into its own audio stream; from each of which, information is extracted that is relevant to the application scenario (audio event detection, speaker identification, emotion classification, etc.). However, running these tasks linearly increases the overall response time, while making the last tasks (separation and classification) highly sensitive to errors of the first task (location). A considerable amount of effort and computational complexity has been employed in the state-of-the-art to develop techniques that are the least error-prone possible. However, doing so gives rise to an ASA system that is non-viable in many applications that require a small computational footprint and a low response time, such as bioacoustics, hearing-aid design, search and rescue, human-robot interaction, etc. To this effect, in this work, a multi-agent approach is proposed to carry out ASA where the tasks are run in parallel, with feedback loops between them to compensate for local errors, such as: using the quality of the separation output to correct the location error; and using the classification result to reduce the localization's sensitivity towards interferences. The result is a multi-agent auditory scene analysis (MASA) system that is robust against local errors, without a considerable increase in complexity, and with a low response time. The complete proposed MASA system is provided as a publicly available framework that uses open-source tools for sound acquisition and reproduction (JACK) and inter-agent communication (ROS2), allowing users to add their own agents.