  This paper introduces Gabor scattering, a feature extractor based on Gabor
frames and Mallat's scattering transform. By using a simple signal model for
audio signals specific properties of Gabor scattering are studied. It is shown
that for each layer, specific invariances to certain signal characteristics
occur. Furthermore, deformation stability of the coefficient vector generated
by the feature extractor is derived by using a decoupling technique which
exploits the contractivity of general scattering networks. Deformations are
introduced as changes in spectral shape and frequency modulation. The
theoretical results are illustrated by numerical examples and experiments.
Numerical evidence is given by evaluation on a synthetic and a "real" data set,
that the invariances encoded by the Gabor scattering transform lead to higher
performance in comparison with just using Gabor transform, especially when few
training samples are available.
