Birds have been widely used as biological indicators for ecological research. They respond quickly to environmental changes and can be used to infer about other organisms (e.g., insects they feed on). Traditional methods for collecting data about birds involves costly human effort. A promising alternative is acoustic monitoring. There are many advantages to recording audio of birds compared to human surveys, including increased temporal and spatial resolution and extent, applicability in remote sites, reduced observer bias, and potentially lower cost. However, it is an open problem for signal processing and machine learning to reliably identify bird sounds in real-world audio data collected in an acoustic monitoring scenario. Some of the major challenges include multiple simultaneously vocalizing birds, other sources of non-bird sound (e.g., buzzing insects), and background noise like wind, rain, and motor vehicles.
@INPROCEEDINGS{6661934,
author={Briggs, F. and Yonghong Huang and Raich, R. and Eftaxias, K. and Zhong Lei and Cukierski, W. and Hadley, S.F. and Hadley, A. and Betts, M. and Fern, X.Z. and Irvine, J. and Neal, L. and Thomas, A. and Fodor, G. and Tsoumakas, G. and Hong Wei Ng and Thi Ngoc Tho Nguyen and Huttunen, H. and Ruusuvuori, P. and Manninen, T. and Diment, A. and Virtanen, T. and Marzat, J. and Defretin, J. and Callender, D. and Hurlburt, C. and Larrey, K. and Milakov, M.},
booktitle={Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), 2013 IEEE International Workshop on},
title={The 9th annual MLSP competition: New methods for acoustic classification of multiple simultaneous bird species in a noisy environment},
year={2013},
month={Sept},
pages={1-8},
keywords={acoustic signal processing;audio recording;audio signal processing;ecology;learning (artificial intelligence);signal resolution;zoology;MLSP competition;acoustic classification;acoustic monitoring scenario;audio recording;background noise;biological indicators;bird sounds;ecological research;human effort;human surveys;machine learning;multiple simultaneous bird species;noisy environment;nonbird sound;real-world audio data;reduced observer bias;remote sites;signal processing;spatial resolution;temporal resolution;Birds;Histograms;Image segmentation;Noise;Rain;Spectrogram;Vectors},
doi={10.1109/MLSP.2013.6661934},
ISSN={1551-2541},}