Computer learns to recognize sounds by watching video
In recent years, computers have gotten remarkably good at recognizing speech and images: Think of the dictation software on most cellphones, or the algorithms that automatically identify people in photos posted to Facebook. But recognition of natural sounds — such as crowds cheering or waves crashing — has lagged behind. That’s because most automated recognition systems, whether they process audio or visual information, are the result of machine learning, in which computers search for patterns in huge compendia of training data. Usually, the training data has to be first annotated by hand, which is prohibitively expensive for all but the highest-demand applications. Sound recognition may be catching up, however, thanks to researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference next week, they will present a sound-recognition system that outperforms its predecessors but didn’t require hand-annotated data during training. Instead, the researchers trained the system...