Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Crowd-sourcing soundscape
characterisation and biodiversity
monitoring
Timos Papadopoulos
Stephen J. Roberts
Katherine J. Willis

Oxford Long-term Machine Learning

Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Main objectives of current work

•  Aim is to address scale of problem by
implementing on mobile devices and using
citizen-science networks
•  Focused on bird sound detection and species
recognition
•  Crowd-source recordings and make use of user
corrective input – active learning
•  Side-step ‘linguistics’ pre-processing (syllable
segmentation etc.)
Oxford Long-term Machine Learning
Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Bag of Frames – Histograms of features

Introduced for bird audio classification in Briggs et al. IEEE ICDM 2009

•  Use median, IQR, SFM audio features

•  Classify using KL divergence between
histograms as distance (also testing other
distance measures)

Oxford Long-term Machine Learning

Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Training data

Bird vocalisations

Detection and classification of

1
Centre for Digital Music
acoustic scenes and events: 3
Music Informatics group Ambient noise
School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London an IEEE AASP challenge 2
Analysis-Synthesis team
IRCAM, CNRS-STMS
City University London

emmanouil.benetos.1@city.ac.uk
{dimitrios,dan.stowell,mark.plumbley}@eecs.qmul.ac.uk Dimitrios Giannoulis1, Emmanouil Benetos3, Dan Stowell1, Mathias Rossignol2,
{mathieu.lagrange,matthias.rossignol}@ircam.fr
Mathieu Lagrange2, and Mark Plumbley1

Abstract: What is this challenge about?

A public evaluation on the performance of systems dealing with two important subtasks in Computational Auditory Scene Analysis:
the classification of acoustic scenes and the detection of acoustic events. Main challenge aims:
• Help the research community move a step forward in better defining the specific tasks.
• Offer a comprehensive evaluation framework and methodology for the tasks.
Oxford Long-term Machine Learning
• Provide incentive for researchers to pursue research in this field by making available a well-structured and fully documented datset.
Ecology Laboratory
• Help to shed light on controversies that currently exist in the tasks.
Research Group

Challenge results
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Test data - University Parks Oxford

Erithacus rubecula
Troglodytes troglodytes
Coloeus monedula
Garrulus glandarius
Parus major
Turdus merula
Prunella modularis
Fringilla coelebs
Fulica atra
Gallinula chloropus
Chloris chloris

Gratefully acknowledging the contribution of Dr. Paul Jepson of the Biodiversity Institute

Oxford Long-term Machine Learning

Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Detect – identify species (Great tit)

Oxford Long-term Machine Learning

Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Bird v. No bird – Missing training data

Intervals of
blue tit calls

Oxford Long-term Machine Learning

Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Performance

Oxford Long-term Machine Learning

Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Adding rejection option

Oxford Long-term Machine Learning

Ecology Laboratory Research Group
 Ecology and Acoustics 16-18 Jun 2014 Paris

Current and future work

•  Systematic evaluation of discriminative power on
longer annotated recordings – Dataset balancing
•  Assessment of performance v. computational cost
on different parameters of the classifier
•  Introduction of geographic prior information from
seasonal species distribution data
•  Combine weak classifiers’ output at higher level
classifier – Computational power considerations
•  Utilisation of probabilistic classification output for
eliciting citizen-science input
Oxford Long-term Machine Learning
Ecology Laboratory Research Group