Densely Connected CNNs for Bird Audio Detection

Detecting bird sounds in audio recordings automatically, if accurate enough, is expected to be of great help to the research community working in bio- and ecoacoustics, interested in monitoring biodiversity based on audio field recordings. To estimate how accurate the state-of-the-art machine learning approaches are, the Bird Audio Detection challenge involving large audio datasets was recently organized. In this paper, experiments using several types of convolutional neural networks (i.e. standard CNNs, residual nets and densely connected nets) are reported in the framework of this challenge. DenseNets were the preferred solution since they were the best performing and most compact models, leading to a 88.22% area under the receiver operator curve score on the test set of the challenge. Performance gains were obtained thank to data augmentation through time and frequency shifting, model parameter averaging during training and ensemble methods using the geometric mean. On the contrary, the attempts to enlarge the training dataset with samples of the test set with automatic predictions used as pseudo-groundtruth labels consistently degraded performance

Robust sound event detection in bioacoustic sensor networks

Bioacoustic sensors, sometimes known as autonomous recording units (ARUs), can record sounds of wildlife over long periods of time in scalable and minimally invasive ways. Deriving per-species abundance estimates from these sensors requires detection, classification, and quantification of animal vocalizations as individual acoustic events. Yet, variability in ambient noise, both over time and across sensors, hinders the reliability of current automated systems for sound event detection (SED), such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) in the time-frequency domain. In this article, we develop, benchmark, and combine several machine listening techniques to improve the generalizability of SED models across heterogeneous acoustic environments. As a case study, we consider the problem of detecting avian flight calls from a ten-hour recording of nocturnal bird migration, recorded by a network of six ARUs in the presence of heterogeneous background noise. Starting from a CNN yielding state-of-the-art accuracy on this task, we introduce two noise adaptation techniques, respectively integrating short-term (60 milliseconds) and long-term (30 minutes) context. First, we apply per-channel energy normalization (PCEN) in the time-frequency domain, which applies short-term automatic gain control to every subband in the mel-frequency spectrogram. Secondly, we replace the last dense layer in the network by a context-adaptive neural network (CA-NN) layer. Combining them yields state-of-the-art results that are unmatched by artificial data augmentation alone. We release a pre-trained version of our best performing system under the name of BirdVoxDetect, a ready-to-use detector of avian flight calls in field recordings.Comment: 32 pages, in English. Submitted to PLOS ONE journal in February 2019; revised August 2019; published October 201

Herramienta móvil para la identificación de aves por medio de su canto, para el JBUTP

La Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira (UTP), cuenta con un jardín botánico (JBUTP), en este se realizan varias actividades, entre esas la observación de aves, esta actividad es efectuada por estudiantes, docentes de la universidad, también por habitantes de la ciudad y turistas, tanto del país como extranjeros, sin embargo, varios de los que practican esta actividad les resulta complicado reconocer las aves que no han visto antes, unos buscan en internet con la poca descripción que tienen, otros buscan en libros y más difícil aun si lo único que se ha logrado es escuchar el ave. Es posible reconocer el ave con solo su canto ya que la mayoría para facilitar el avistamiento de aves a través de su canto, primero contar con información básica de las aves, para así facilitar reconocer el ave y saber más de esta, luego definir que algoritmo utilizar para reconocer el ave con solo su canto, después con la información a implantar y el algoritmo definido, se estructura el núcleo (arquitectura) de los aplicativos a realizar para con ello realizar el desarrollo, luego al tenerlo desarrollado se ejecutan unas pruebas que verifican el correcto funcionamiento del sistema, por último se construye un manual de usuario que informa como darle uso a la herramienta

Automatic detection and classi cation of bird sounds in low-resource wildlife audio datasets

PhDThere are many potential applications of automatic species detection and classifi cation of birds from their sounds (e.g. ecological research, biodiversity monitoring, archival). However, acquiring adequately labelled large-scale and longitudinal data remains a major challenge, especially for species-rich remote areas as well as taxa that require expert input for identi fication. So far, monitoring of avian populations has been performed via manual surveying, sometimes even including the help of volunteers due to the challenging scales of the data. In recent decades, there is an increasing amount of ecological audio datasets that have tags assigned to them to indicate the presence or not of a specific c bird species. However, automated species vocalization detection and identifi cation is a challenging task. There is a high diversity of animal vocalisations, both in the types of the basic syllables and in the way they are combined. Also, there is noise present in most habitats, and many bird communities contain multiple bird species that can potentially have overlapping vocalisations. In recent years, machine learning has experienced a strong growth, due to increased dataset sizes and computational power, and to advances in deep learning methods that can learn to make predictions in extremely nonlinear problem settings. However, in training a deep learning system to perform automatic detection and audio tagging of wildlife bird sound scenes, two problems often arise. Firstly, even with the increased amount of audio datasets, most publicly available datasets are weakly labelled, having only a list of events present in each recording without any temporal information for training. Secondly, in practice it is difficult to collect enough samples for most classes of interest. These problems are particularly pressing for wildlife audio but also occur in many other scenarios. In this thesis, we investigate and propose methods to perform audio event detection and classi fication on wildlife bird sound scenes and other low-resource audio datasets, such as methods based on image processing and deep learning. We extend deep learning methods for weakly labelled data in a multi-instance learning and multi task learning setting. We evaluate these methods for simultaneously detecting and classifying large numbers of sound types in audio recorded in the wild and other low resource audio datasets