Development of a Mobile Application for Crowdsourcing the Data Collection of Environmental Sounds

Our study introduces a mobile navigation system enabling a sound input interface. To realize high-performance environmental sound recognition system using Android devices, we organized a database of environmental sounds collected in our daily lives. Crowdsourcing is a useful approach for organizing a database based on collaborative works of people. We recruited trial users to test our system via a web-based crowdsourcing service provider in Japan. However, we found that improvement of the system is important for maintaining the motivation of users in order to continue the collection of sounds. We believe that the improved user interface (UI) design introduced to facilitate the annotation task. This paper describes an overview of our system, focusing on a method for utilizing the crowdsourcing approach using Android devices, and its UI design. We developed a touch panel UI for the annotation task by selecting an appropriate class of a sound source.