  We introduce the joint time-frequency scattering transform, a time shift
invariant descriptor of time-frequency structure for audio classification. It
is obtained by applying a two-dimensional wavelet transform in time and
log-frequency to a time-frequency wavelet scalogram. We show that this
descriptor successfully characterizes complex time-frequency phenomena such as
time-varying filters and frequency modulated excitations. State-of-the-art
results are achieved for signal reconstruction and phone segment classification
on the TIMIT dataset.
