Journal of Computing Theories and Applications
Vol. 3 No. 4 (2026): JCTA 3(4) 2026

A Multi-Branch BiLSTM with Multi-Head Self-Attention for Suspicious Sound Recognition

Shehu Mohammed Yusuf (Ahmadu Bello University)
Hamza Saidu (Ahmadu Bello University)
Sani Saleh Saminu (Ahmadu Bello University)



Article Info

Publish Date
12 May 2026

Abstract

Suspicious urban sound recognition is a critical component of intelligent public safety and urban monitoring systems, enabling the automated identification of anomalous acoustic events such as gunshots, sirens, and other security-sensitive sounds. However, existing deep learning approaches often struggle to simultaneously capture long-range temporal dependencies and global contextual relationships, particularly under noisy and acoustically complex urban conditions. This limitation can reduce reliability in safety-critical scenarios where missed detections carry significant risk. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Multi-Branch Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) framework with Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) for enhanced sequential and contextual feature modeling. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are extracted from a curated subset of the UrbanSound8K dataset, comprising five suspicious sound classes, and used as input to the proposed architecture. The multi-branch design enables complementary temporal representations, while the self-attention mechanism provides lightweight contextual weighting of BiLSTM outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a test accuracy of 95.59%, outperforming conventional Dense and LSTM-based baseline models under identical experimental settings. An ablation study further confirms the contribution of multi-branch integration and attention-based enhancement to overall performance. Class-wise evaluation reveals consistently high recall across all sound categories, particularly for safety-critical classes such as gunshots and sirens. These findings indicate that the proposed framework provides robust and reliable performance, making it suitable for real-time smart city surveillance and public safety applications.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

jcta

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management

Description

Journal of Computing Theories and Applications (JCTA) is a refereed, international journal that covers all aspects of foundations, theories and the practical applications of computer science. FREE OF CHARGE for submission and publication. All accepted articles will be published online and accessed ...