Automatic large-scale classification of bird sounds is strongly improved by unsupervised feature learning

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Audio-only bird classification using unsupervised feature learning

We describe our method for automatic bird species classification, which uses raw audio without segmentation and without using any auxiliary metadata. It successfully classifies among 501 bird categories, and was by far the highest scoring audio-only bird recognition algorithm submitted to BirdCLEF 2014. Our method uses unsupervised feature learning, a technique which learns regularities in spectro-temporal content without reference to the training labels, which helps a classifier to generalise to further content of the same type. Our strongest submission uses two layers of feature learning to capture regularities at two different time scales

ORCA-SPOT: An Automatic Killer Whale Sound Detection Toolkit Using Deep Learning

Large bioacoustic archives of wild animals are an important source to identify reappearing communication patterns, which can then be related to recurring behavioral patterns to advance the current understanding of intra-specific communication of non-human animals. A main challenge remains that most large-scale bioacoustic archives contain only a small percentage of animal vocalizations and a large amount of environmental noise, which makes it extremely difficult to manually retrieve sufficient vocalizations for further analysis – particularly important for species with advanced social systems and complex vocalizations. In this study deep neural networks were trained on 11,509 killer whale (Orcinus orca) signals and 34,848 noise segments. The resulting toolkit ORCA-SPOT was tested on a large-scale bioacoustic repository – the Orchive – comprising roughly 19,000 hours of killer whale underwater recordings. An automated segmentation of the entire Orchive recordings (about 2.2 years) took approximately 8 days. It achieved a time-based precision or positive-predictive-value (PPV) of 93.2% and an area-under-the-curve (AUC) of 0.9523. This approach enables an automated annotation procedure of large bioacoustics databases to extract killer whale sounds, which are essential for subsequent identification of significant communication patterns. The code will be publicly available in October 2019 to support the application of deep learning to bioaoucstic research. ORCA-SPOT can be adapted to other animal species