Clotho dataset code

Welcome to the repository of Clotho dataset.

Here you can find the code that will create numpy files with input/output values, for using Clotho dataset with your audio captioning methods.

The creation of clotho dataset is presented in our paper:

K. Drossos, S. Lipping, and T. Virtanen, "Clotho: An Audio Captioning Dataset," accepted in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 4-8, 2020

An online version of our paper can be found at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09387

If you use Clotho dataset, please cite our paper.

If you use the code in this repository to handle the Clotho dataset, then you can find useful the DataLoader in the Clotho data loader repository.

This repository is maintained by K. Drossos.

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Table of contents

1. Set up of data and code
2. Using the code
3. Using your own feature extraction functions

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Set up of data and code

To set up the data and the code, you need the data of Clotho from Zenodo and the code from the repository. Finally, you need to set up the dependencies. For the latter, we provide a ready made environment with Anaconda.

Getting the data from Zenodo

To start using Clotho dataset, you have first to download it from Zenodo:

There are at least four files that you need to have from the Zenodo repository, two for the development split and two for the evaluation split:

1. clotho_audio_development.7z: the 7z archive file with the audio data for the development split
2. clotho_captions_development.csv: the CSV file with the captions of the development split
3. clotho_audio_evaluation.7z: the 7z archive file with the audio data for the evaluation split
4. clotho_captions_evaluation.csv: the CSV file with the captions of the evaluation split

Expanding the 7z files, will produce two directories:

1. clotho_audio_development.7z will produce the development directory
2. clotho_audio_evaluation.7z will produce the evaluation directory

Clone and set-up the code

To use this repository, you have first to clone it to your computer. Doing so, will result in having the top directory of this project clotho-baseline-dataset. In the clotho-baseline-dataset, you can find the following directories:

1. data
2. processes
3. settings
4. tools

The directories created by expanding the 7z files mentioned in the previous subsection, have to be in the data directory. That is, the development and evaluation directories have to be placed in the data directory.

If you want to change the naming of the directories of audio data (i.e. development and evaluation) then make sure to do the corresponding changes at the settings file dataset_creation.yaml in the settings directory.

Install dependencies

To install the necessary dependecies, you can use the Anaconda package manager. If you want to use a different package manager (e.g. PIP) you can check the packages that are needed by the clotho_conda_requirements.yaml file.

With the provide file (), you can create a new environment with conda and use it to run the code in this repository. The name of the environment is clotho-baseline-dataset. You can create the environment by using the conda commands.

First, make sure that you have the Anaconda set up in your computer. If not, please install it. Then, open your terminal and navigate to the root directory of the current repository. Then, issue the following command:

conda env create --file clotho_conda_requirements.yaml 
conda activate clotho-baseline-dataset

That's it! Now you have installed all the necessary packages, the proper Python version (i.e. 3.7), and you are set up to use the code from this repository. When you are finished, and if youdo not whish to keep the clotho-baseline-dataset conda environment, you can use the following command which will delete the clotho-baseline-dataset environment:

conda remove --name clotho-baseline-dataset --all

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Using the code

The data that you downloaded from Zenodo are audio files and captions in CSV files. To use the data, you most probably want to have an audio file as an input to your system and a caption as a targeted output. Also, most probably you will not use raw audio samples as an input, but some features extracted from the raw audio.

With the code in this repository you can:

1. Create numpy objects with audio and corresponding caption
2. Extract features from the audio and insert them to the numpy objects with the captions

To use the code in this repository you can either use the bash script clotho-dataset-script.sh (which will run the complete process) or use the main function from the files main.py, processes/dataset.py, and processes/features.py.

Creating the split data

To create the split data, you can use the settings in the settings/dataset_creation.yaml file and the function create_dataset from the processes/dataset.py file. You can do this by either directly using the processes/dataset.py file or using the script clotho-dataset-script.sh. In any case, the process will use the settings in the settings/dataset_creation.yaml file.

Extracting features

To extract features from audio data, you have first to create the split data using the process described above. Thus, you can follow a two-step approach where you first create the split data and then you extract features, or do everything in one step.

By default, the features that are extracted are 64 log mel-bands, using the settings that are in the file settings/feature_extraction.yaml.

One-step approach

If you do everything in one step, then make sure that both of the entries under workflow in settings/dataset_creation.yaml are set to Yes. That is, you should have:

workflow: 
  create_dataset: Yes
  extract_features: Yes

Then, you just use the script clotho-dataset-script.sh and everything will be done. To use the script clotho-dataset-script.sh, open your terminal, navigate to the root directory of the repository, and issue the following commands:

chmod +x clotho-dataset-script.sh
./clotho-dataset-script.sh

Make sure that you have specified correctly the desired/needed names for directories in the settings/dataset_creation.yaml file.

Two-step approach

There might be the case where you want to have the data for each split but try different features. In such a case, you can first create the data for the splits and, in a second step, extract the features.

To do so, you can switch the flags in the settings/dataset_creation.yaml file:

workflow: 
  create_dataset: Yes
  extract_features: Yes

and choose the desired action.

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Using your own feature extraction functions

By default, the extracted features are 64 log mel-band energies. You can provide your own function for extraction of features. This function should:

1. Accept as first argument a numpy.ndarray object
2. Accept as other arguments the settings for the feature extraction process
3. Return one numpy.ndarray object with the extracted features
4. Called feature_extraction

The values for settings of the other arguments are from the settings/feature_extraction.yaml file, under the key process. The name of the other arguments should be the keys for the entries in the process field.

For example, with the current settings/feature_extraction.yaml, to the feature extraction process are given as arguments all the entries from line 19 to 29 of the file. That is:

kwargs = {'sr': 44100, 'nb_fft': 1024, hop_size=512, ...}

Finally, you have to specify the package and module of the function in the settings/feature_extraction.yaml file. The package is specified at the package entry and the module at the module entry. As an example, you can check the current feature extraction function.