Deep Spectrogram Learning for Gunshot Classification: A Comparative Study of CNN Architectures and Time-Frequency Representations

Gunshot sound classification plays a crucial role in public safety, forensic investigations, and intelligent surveillance systems. This study evaluates the performance of deep learning models in classifying firearm sounds by analyzing twelve time-frequency spectrogram representations, including Mel, Bark, MFCC, CQT, Cochleagram, STFT, FFT, Reassigned, Chroma, Spectral Contrast, and Wavelet. The dataset consists of 2148 gunshot recordings from four firearm types, collected in a semi-controlled outdoor environment under multi-orientation conditions. To leverage advanced computer vision techniques, all spectrograms were converted into RGB images using perceptually informed colormaps. This enabled the application of image processing approaches and fine-tuning of pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) originally developed for natural image classification. Six CNN architectures-ResNet18, ResNet50, ResNet101, GoogLeNet, Inception-v3, and InceptionResNetV2-were trained on these spectrogram images. Experimental results indicate that CQT, Cochleagram, and Mel spectrograms consistently achieved high classification accuracy, exceeding 94% when paired with deep CNNs such as ResNet101 and InceptionResNetV2. These findings demonstrate that transforming time-frequency features into RGB images not only facilitates the use of image-based processing but also allows deep models to capture rich spectral-temporal patterns, providing a robust framework for accurate firearm sound classification.