This paper proposes a novel framework for lung sound event detection,
segmenting continuous lung sound recordings into discrete events and performing
recognition on each event. Exploiting the lightweight nature of Temporal
Convolution Networks (TCNs) and their superior results compared to their
recurrent counterparts, we propose a lightweight, yet robust, and completely
interpretable framework for lung sound event detection. We propose the use of a
multi-branch TCN architecture and exploit a novel fusion strategy to combine
the resultant features from these branches. This not only allows the network to
retain the most salient information across different temporal granularities and
disregards irrelevant information, but also allows our network to process
recordings of arbitrary length. Results: The proposed method is evaluated on
multiple public and in-house benchmarks of irregular and noisy recordings of
the respiratory auscultation process for the identification of numerous
auscultation events including inhalation, exhalation, crackles, wheeze,
stridor, and rhonchi. We exceed the state-of-the-art results in all
evaluations. Furthermore, we empirically analyse the effect of the proposed
multi-branch TCN architecture and the feature fusion strategy and provide
quantitative and qualitative evaluations to illustrate their efficiency.
Moreover, we provide an end-to-end model interpretation pipeline that
interprets the operations of all the components of the proposed framework. Our
analysis of different feature fusion strategies shows that the proposed feature
concatenation method leads to better suppression of non-informative features,
which drastically reduces the classifier overhead resulting in a robust
lightweight network.The lightweight nature of our model allows it to be
deployed in end-user devices such as smartphones, and it has the ability to
generate predictions in real-time.

本文提出一种基于 Temporal Convolution Networks 的轻量级呼吸音事件检测的框架，采用多分支结构和特征融合策略获取最显著的信息，能够在不同的长时间粒度下处理任意长度的音频，实时预测多种事件，并在公共数据集和实际应用场景中实现了排名第一的效果。