I must do reCAPTCHA at least a dozen times a week for various websites I use. It’s become a real pain. And the fact that I know that what I am doing is helping some AI image recognition program do a better job of identifying street signs, mountains, or shop fronts doesn’t reduce my angst.
But that’s the thing with deep learning, machine learning, re-inforcement learning, etc. they all need massive amounts of annotated data that’s a correct interpretation of a scene in order to train properly.
Computers to the rescue
So, when I read a recent article in MIT News that Computers learn to recognize sounds by watching video, I was intrigued. What the researchers at MIT have done is use advanced image recognition to annotate film clips with the names of things that are making sounds on the film. They then fed this automatically annotated data into a sound identifying algorithm to improve its recognition capability.
They used this approach to train their sound recognition system to be able to identify natural and artificial sounds like bird song, speaking in crowds, traffic sounds, etc.
They tested their newly automatically trained sound recognition against standard labeled sound sets and was able to categorize sound with a 92% accuracy for a 10 category data set and with a 74% accuracy with a 50 category dataset. Humans are able categorize these sounds with a 96% and 81% accuracy, respectively.
AI’s need for annotation
The problem with machine learning is that it needs a massive, properly annotated data set in order to learn properly. But getting annotated data takes too long or is too expensive to do for many things that we want AI for.
Using one AI tool to annotate data to train another AI tool is sort of bootstrapping AI technology. It’s acute trick but may have only limited application. I could only think of only a few more applications of similar technology:
- Use chest strap or EKG technology to annotate audio clips of heart beat sounds at a wrist or other appendage to train a system to accurately determine pulse rates through sound alone.
- Use wave monitoring technology to annotate pictures and audio clips of sea waves to train a system to accurately determine wave levels for better tsunami detection.
- Use image recognition to annotate pictures of food and then use this train a system to recognize food smells (if they ever find a way to record smells).
But there may be many others. Just further refinement of what they have used could lead to finer grained people detection. For example, as (facial) image recognition gets better, it’s possible to annotate speaking film clips to train a sound recognition system to identify people from just hearing their speech. Intelligence applications for such technology are significant.
Nonetheless, I for one am happy that the next reCAPTCHA won’t be having me identify river sounds in a matrix of 9 sound clips.
But I fear there’s enough GreyBeards on Storage podcast recordings and Storage Field Day video clips already available to train a system to identify Ray’s and for sure, Howard’s voice anywhere on the planet…
Comments?
Photo Credit(s): Wave by Matthew Potter; Waves crashing on Puget Sound by mikeskatie; Day 16: Podcasting by Laura Blankenship
