Dataset Information

Improving biodiversity assessment via unsupervised separation of biological sounds from long-duration recordings.

ABSTRACT: Investigating the dynamics of biodiversity via passive acoustic monitoring is a challenging task, owing to the difficulty of identifying different animal vocalizations. Several indices have been proposed to measure acoustic complexity and to predict biodiversity. Although these indices perform well under low-noise conditions, they may be biased when environmental and anthropogenic noises are involved. In this paper, we propose a periodicity coded non-negative matrix factorization (PC-NMF) for separating different sound sources from a spectrogram of long-term recordings. The PC-NMF first decomposes a spectrogram into two matrices: spectral basis matrix and encoding matrix. Next, on the basis of the periodicity of the encoding information, the spectral bases belonging to the same source are grouped together. Finally, distinct sources are reconstructed on the basis of the cluster of the basis matrix and the corresponding encoding information, and the noise components are then removed to facilitate more accurate monitoring of biological sounds. Our results show that the PC-NMF precisely enhances biological choruses, effectively suppressing environmental and anthropogenic noises in marine and terrestrial recordings without a need for training data. The results may improve behaviour assessment of calling animals and facilitate the investigation of the interactions between different sound sources within an ecosystem.

SUBMITTER: Lin TH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5495775 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Improving biodiversity assessment via unsupervised separation of biological sounds from long-duration recordings.

Lin Tzu-Hao TH Fang Shih-Hua SH Tsao Yu Y

Scientific reports 20170703 1

Investigating the dynamics of biodiversity via passive acoustic monitoring is a challenging task, owing to the difficulty of identifying different animal vocalizations. Several indices have been proposed to measure acoustic complexity and to predict biodiversity. Although these indices perform well under low-noise conditions, they may be biased when environmental and anthropogenic noises are involved. In this paper, we propose a periodicity coded non-negative matrix factorization (PC-NMF) for se ...[more]

PMID: 28674439

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Project description:Automatic species classification of birds from their sound is a computational tool of increasing importance in ecology, conservation monitoring and vocal communication studies. To make classification useful in practice, it is crucial to improve its accuracy while ensuring that it can run at big data scales. Many approaches use acoustic measures based on spectrogram-type data, such as the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features which represent a manually-designed summary of spectral information. However, recent work in machine learning has demonstrated that features learnt automatically from data can often outperform manually-designed feature transforms. Feature learning can be performed at large scale and "unsupervised", meaning it requires no manual data labelling, yet it can improve performance on "supervised" tasks such as classification. In this work we introduce a technique for feature learning from large volumes of bird sound recordings, inspired by techniques that have proven useful in other domains. We experimentally compare twelve different feature representations derived from the Mel spectrum (of which six use this technique), using four large and diverse databases of bird vocalisations, classified using a random forest classifier. We demonstrate that in our classification tasks, MFCCs can often lead to worse performance than the raw Mel spectral data from which they are derived. Conversely, we demonstrate that unsupervised feature learning provides a substantial boost over MFCCs and Mel spectra without adding computational complexity after the model has been trained. The boost is particularly notable for single-label classification tasks at large scale. The spectro-temporal activations learned through our procedure resemble spectro-temporal receptive fields calculated from avian primary auditory forebrain. However, for one of our datasets, which contains substantial audio data but few annotations, increased performance is not discernible. We study the interaction between dataset characteristics and choice of feature representation through further empirical analysis.

Dataset Information

Improving biodiversity assessment via unsupervised separation of biological sounds from long-duration recordings.

Publications

Improving biodiversity assessment via unsupervised separation of biological sounds from long-duration recordings.

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