Unsupervised learning of sparse features for scalable audio classification

In this work we present a system to automatically learn features from audio in an unsupervised manner. Our method first learns an overcomplete dictionary which can be used to sparsely decompose log-scaled spectrograms. It then trains an efficient encoder which quickly maps new inputs to approximations of their sparse representations using the learned dictionary. This avoids expensive iterative procedures usually required to infer sparse codes. We then use these sparse codes as inputs for a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM). Our system achieves 83.4% accuracy in predicting genres on the GTZAN dataset, which is competitive with current state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the use of a simple linear classifier combined with a fast feature extraction system allows our approach to scale well to large datasets.