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Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures

With the demand for recorded lectures to be made available as soon as possible, the University of Cape Town (UCT) needs to find innovative ways of removing bottlenecks in lecture capture workflow and thereby improving turn-around times from capture to publication. UCT utilises Opencast, which is an...

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Main Author: Govender, Devandran
Other Authors: Suleman, Hussein
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Department of Computer Science 2019
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access_status_str Open Access
author Govender, Devandran
author2 Suleman, Hussein
author_browse Govender, Devandran
Suleman, Hussein
author_facet Suleman, Hussein
Govender, Devandran
author_sort Govender, Devandran
collection Thesis
description With the demand for recorded lectures to be made available as soon as possible, the University of Cape Town (UCT) needs to find innovative ways of removing bottlenecks in lecture capture workflow and thereby improving turn-around times from capture to publication. UCT utilises Opencast, which is an open source system to manage all the steps in the lecture-capture process. One of the steps involves manual trimming of unwanted segments from the beginning and end of video before it is published. These segments generally contain student chatter. The trimming step of the lecture-capture process has been identified as a bottleneck due to its dependence on staff availability. In this study, we investigate the potential of audio classification to automate this step. A classification model was trained to detect 2 classes: speech and non-speech. Speech represents a single dominant voice, for example, the lecturer, and non-speech represents student chatter, silence and other environmental sounds. In conjunction with the classification model, the first and last instances of the speech class together with their timestamps are detected. These timestamps are used to predict the start and end trim points for the recorded lecture. The classification model achieved a 97.8% accuracy rate at detecting speech from non-speech. The start trim point predictions were very positive, with an average difference of -11.22s from gold standard data. End trim point predictions showed a much greater deviation, with an average difference of 145.16s from gold standard data. Discussions between the lecturer and students, after the lecture, was predominantly the reason for this discrepancy.
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id oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/29778
institution University of Cape Town (South Africa)
language eng
last_indexed 2026-06-10T12:32:57.328Z
license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2019
publishDateRange 2019
publishDateSort 2019
publisher Department of Computer Science
publisherStr Department of Computer Science
record_format dspace
source_str UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/29778 Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures Govender, Devandran Suleman, Hussein Information Technology With the demand for recorded lectures to be made available as soon as possible, the University of Cape Town (UCT) needs to find innovative ways of removing bottlenecks in lecture capture workflow and thereby improving turn-around times from capture to publication. UCT utilises Opencast, which is an open source system to manage all the steps in the lecture-capture process. One of the steps involves manual trimming of unwanted segments from the beginning and end of video before it is published. These segments generally contain student chatter. The trimming step of the lecture-capture process has been identified as a bottleneck due to its dependence on staff availability. In this study, we investigate the potential of audio classification to automate this step. A classification model was trained to detect 2 classes: speech and non-speech. Speech represents a single dominant voice, for example, the lecturer, and non-speech represents student chatter, silence and other environmental sounds. In conjunction with the classification model, the first and last instances of the speech class together with their timestamps are detected. These timestamps are used to predict the start and end trim points for the recorded lecture. The classification model achieved a 97.8% accuracy rate at detecting speech from non-speech. The start trim point predictions were very positive, with an average difference of -11.22s from gold standard data. End trim point predictions showed a much greater deviation, with an average difference of 145.16s from gold standard data. Discussions between the lecturer and students, after the lecture, was predominantly the reason for this discrepancy. 2019-02-22T11:53:48Z 2019-02-22T11:53:48Z 2018 2019-02-19T07:12:58Z Master Thesis Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/29778 eng application/pdf Department of Computer Science Faculty of Science University of Cape Town
spellingShingle Information Technology
Govender, Devandran
Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures
thesis_degree_str Master's
title Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures
title_full Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures
title_fullStr Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures
title_full_unstemmed Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures
title_short Investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures
title_sort investigating audio classification to automate the trimming of recorded lectures
topic Information Technology
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/29778
work_keys_str_mv AT govenderdevandran investigatingaudioclassificationtoautomatethetrimmingofrecordedlectures