The Search for Squawk: Agile Modeling in Bioacoustics

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Dumoulin, Vincent, Stretcu, Otilia, Hamer, Jenny, Harrell, Lauren, Laber, Rob, Larochelle, Hugo, van Merriënboer, Bart, Navine, Amanda, Hart, Patrick, Williams, Ben, Lamont, Timothy A. C., Razak, Tries B., Team, Mars Coral Restoration, Brodie, Sheryn, Doohan, Brendan, Eichinski, Phil, Roe, Paul, Schwarzkopf, Lin, Denton, Tom
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Dumoulin, Vincent
Stretcu, Otilia
Hamer, Jenny
Harrell, Lauren
Laber, Rob
Larochelle, Hugo
van Merriënboer, Bart
Navine, Amanda
Hart, Patrick
Williams, Ben
Lamont, Timothy A. C.
Razak, Tries B.
Team, Mars Coral Restoration
Brodie, Sheryn
Doohan, Brendan
Eichinski, Phil
Roe, Paul
Schwarzkopf, Lin
Denton, Tom
author_facet Dumoulin, Vincent
Stretcu, Otilia
Hamer, Jenny
Harrell, Lauren
Laber, Rob
Larochelle, Hugo
van Merriënboer, Bart
Navine, Amanda
Hart, Patrick
Williams, Ben
Lamont, Timothy A. C.
Razak, Tries B.
Team, Mars Coral Restoration
Brodie, Sheryn
Doohan, Brendan
Eichinski, Phil
Roe, Paul
Schwarzkopf, Lin
Denton, Tom
contents Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has shown great promise in helping ecologists understand the health of animal populations and ecosystems. However, extracting insights from millions of hours of audio recordings requires the development of specialized recognizers. This is typically a challenging task, necessitating large amounts of training data and machine learning expertise. In this work, we introduce a general, scalable and data-efficient system for developing recognizers for novel bioacoustic problems in under an hour. Our system consists of several key components that tackle problems in previous bioacoustic workflows: 1) highly generalizable acoustic embeddings pre-trained for birdsong classification minimize data hunger; 2) indexed audio search allows the efficient creation of classifier training datasets, and 3) precomputation of embeddings enables an efficient active learning loop, improving classifier quality iteratively with minimal wait time. Ecologists employed our system in three novel case studies: analyzing coral reef health through unidentified sounds; identifying juvenile Hawaiian bird calls to quantify breeding success and improve endangered species monitoring; and Christmas Island bird occupancy modeling. We augment the case studies with simulated experiments which explore the range of design decisions in a structured way and help establish best practices. Altogether these experiments showcase our system's scalability, efficiency, and generalizability, enabling scientists to quickly address new bioacoustic challenges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03071
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Search for Squawk: Agile Modeling in Bioacoustics
Dumoulin, Vincent
Stretcu, Otilia
Hamer, Jenny
Harrell, Lauren
Laber, Rob
Larochelle, Hugo
van Merriënboer, Bart
Navine, Amanda
Hart, Patrick
Williams, Ben
Lamont, Timothy A. C.
Razak, Tries B.
Team, Mars Coral Restoration
Brodie, Sheryn
Doohan, Brendan
Eichinski, Phil
Roe, Paul
Schwarzkopf, Lin
Denton, Tom
Audio and Speech Processing
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has shown great promise in helping ecologists understand the health of animal populations and ecosystems. However, extracting insights from millions of hours of audio recordings requires the development of specialized recognizers. This is typically a challenging task, necessitating large amounts of training data and machine learning expertise. In this work, we introduce a general, scalable and data-efficient system for developing recognizers for novel bioacoustic problems in under an hour. Our system consists of several key components that tackle problems in previous bioacoustic workflows: 1) highly generalizable acoustic embeddings pre-trained for birdsong classification minimize data hunger; 2) indexed audio search allows the efficient creation of classifier training datasets, and 3) precomputation of embeddings enables an efficient active learning loop, improving classifier quality iteratively with minimal wait time. Ecologists employed our system in three novel case studies: analyzing coral reef health through unidentified sounds; identifying juvenile Hawaiian bird calls to quantify breeding success and improve endangered species monitoring; and Christmas Island bird occupancy modeling. We augment the case studies with simulated experiments which explore the range of design decisions in a structured way and help establish best practices. Altogether these experiments showcase our system's scalability, efficiency, and generalizability, enabling scientists to quickly address new bioacoustic challenges.
title The Search for Squawk: Agile Modeling in Bioacoustics
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03071