The ahem detector is a deep convolutional neural network that is trained on transformed audio signals to recognize "ahem" sounds. The network has been trained to detect such signals on the episodes of Data Science at Home, the podcast about data science at worldofpiggy.com/podcast

Slides and some technical details provided here.

Two sets of audio files are required, very similarly to a cohort study:

• a negative sample with clean voice/sound and

• a positive one with "ahem" sounds concatenated

While the detector works for the aforementioned audio files, it can be generalized to any other audio input, provided enough data are available. The minimum required is ~10 seconds for the positive samples and ~3 minutes for the negative cohort. The network will adapt to the training data and can perform detection on different spoken voice.

Once the training audio files are provided, just load the training set and train the network with the code in the ipython notebook. Make sure to create the local folder that has been hardcoded in the script files below. Build training/testing set before running the script. Execute first

% python make_data_class_0.py
% python make_data_class_1.py

A GPU is recommended as, under the conditions specific to this example at least 5 epochs are required to obtain ~81% accuracy.

A new audio file must be trasformed in the same way of training files. This can be done with

% python make_data_newsample.py

Then follow the script in the ipython notebook that is commented enough to proceed without particular issues.

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