Lightweight Annotation and Class Weight Training for Automatic Estimation of Alarm Audibility in Noise

Abstract

In an effort to improve occupational health and safety, we recently proposed an approach to assess the audibility of acoustic danger signals. It is based on the use of a binary classifier trained on perceptual data to predict the audibility of acoustic alarms in audio clips. In the present article, we first investigate the impact of label noise in the training data induced by a flexible annotation procedure on the model performance. We show that a lighter annotation procedure at training still allows for reaching close to human performance at test time. Besides, threshold selection is a crucial aspect in our application as it can have a direct impact on user safety. We thus explore class weight to train a model that allows for a more robust decision threshold selection, ensuring a low false positive rate.