Representing environmental sounds using the separable scattering transform

Environmental sounds are an interesting subject of study for machine audition because of their wide variety of acoustical characteristics and their central presence in our everyday life. They are perceived effortlessly in the human auditory system whereas state-of-the-art computational systems are far from reaching the same efficiency. In this paper we propose a novel representation of such sounds based on the scattering transform which has the property of stability to time-warping deformations and invariance to time-shift useful for classifications tasks. This representation is compared to several state-of-the-art approaches for the task of quantifying similarity between environmental sounds.