Deep CNN transferred from VAE and GAN for classifying irritating noise in automobile

Noise from automobiles, such as buzzing, squeaking, and rattling (BSR) noises, is a key factor in automobile quality assessment. It is necessary to classify these noises for appropriate handling and prevention. Although many researchers have conducted studies to classify noise, they suffer from several problems: difficulty in extracting appropriate features, insufficient data to train a classifier, and weak robustness to surrounding noise. This paper proposes a method called latent semantic controlling generative adversarial networks (LSC-GAN) to solve these problems. To capture the features of data, a variational autoencoder (VAE), an autoencoder with approximate inference in a latent Gaussian model, learns the data representation by projecting them into the latent space according to their features and reconstructing the projected data. Because the generator and the discriminator of the LSC-GAN are trained simultaneously, the capacity to extract the characteristics of the data is improved and a knowledge space of classifiable data is also expanded with insufficient data. While data are generated by the generator, the encoder projects them back to the latent space according to their characteristics to advance the ability to extract features. Finally, the encoder is trained to the classifier, which is trained to classify BSR noises. The proposed classifier outperforms other models and achieves an accuracy of 96.68%. We confirm using a confusion matrix that the proposed model classifies the types of insufficient class better than other models. Our proposed model classifies data with accuracy of 94.68%, even if the data contains surrounding noise, which means it is more robust to BSR with surrounding noise than other models.