
Bird Audio Detection: baseline tests and the problem of generalisation - jarmitage
http://machine-listening.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/2016/10/bird-audio-detection-baseline-generalisation/
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yareally
I've been working on matching recorded bird audio from a device to known
matches and it's not an easy problem (personal hobby project). Unlike music,
birds have dialects within the same species and that can make it harder to
match the calls of one to another. Dialects that are different enough that
birds of the same species living in the city cannot understand ones that live
in the country.

It's an interesting problem, but there's quite a bit more to it than one would
think. For some birds like the crow, their calls are complex to the point that
they're more like a language. I'd compare it to dolphin communication.

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sosuke
I'm interested in your project. Do you have any blog/site/twitter or what not
that I can follow for updates?

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yareally
If I get something semi usable, I'll probably post it on "show hn". I have a
twitter, but I stopped actively using it a while ago[1]. If you're interested,
I'll try to post updates there when I have something to update on. My public
email is in my hn profile as well.

I do a lot of running and I always hear birds in the forest, but I rarely see
them. Given that it's pretty hard to figure out a bird by its song without
knowing it ahead of time, I started to wonder if there was a way to match
their calls against known samples. As an indirect result of working on the
project, I've gotten better at personally identifying their calls, but would
still rather automate it through an application, because that's more fun :)

Still very much in a prototype stage and I work on it in spurts in between my
day job and other hobby projects. I've been more focused on if I can
accurately analyze and match a couple common species to the area, but I should
probably step back and see if the typical cell phone microphone can even pick
up bird calls from a range of a couple 100 feet. I'm not as worried about that
I guess, since it's for a niche audience and I'd find a way to use it myself
even if it didn't work quite so well on a phone.

[1] [https://twitter.com/yarlyyyy](https://twitter.com/yarlyyyy)

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pja
A friend of mine asked me if it was possible to use machine learning to
identify bird calls from recordings. My initial response is: this sound hard &
I don’t think the available datasets of identified bird recordings are
anywhere near big enough to successfully train a DNN. I’d love to be proved
wrong but if the state of the art is 85% accuracy in just recognising bird
song in the first place then identifying individual species is a long way off.

