Robust Bioacoustic Detection via Richly Labelled Synthetic Soundscape Augmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Soltero, Kaspar, Siqueira, Tadeu, Gutschmidt, Stefanie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Soltero, Kaspar
Siqueira, Tadeu
Gutschmidt, Stefanie
author_facet Soltero, Kaspar
Siqueira, Tadeu
Gutschmidt, Stefanie
contents Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) analysis is often hindered by the intensive manual effort needed to create labelled training data. This study introduces a synthetic data framework to generate large volumes of richly labelled training data from very limited source material, improving the robustness of bioacoustic detection models. Our framework synthesises realistic soundscapes by combining clean background noise with isolated target vocalisations (little owl), automatically generating dynamic labels like bounding boxes during synthesis. A model fine-tuned on this data generalised well to real-world soundscapes, with performance remaining high even when the diversity of source vocalisations was drastically reduced, indicating the model learned generalised features without overfitting. This demonstrates that synthetic data generation is a highly effective strategy for training robust bioacoustic detectors from small source datasets. The approach significantly reduces manual labelling effort, overcoming a key bottleneck in computational bioacoustics and enhancing ecological assessment capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_16235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Bioacoustic Detection via Richly Labelled Synthetic Soundscape Augmentation
Soltero, Kaspar
Siqueira, Tadeu
Gutschmidt, Stefanie
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) analysis is often hindered by the intensive manual effort needed to create labelled training data. This study introduces a synthetic data framework to generate large volumes of richly labelled training data from very limited source material, improving the robustness of bioacoustic detection models. Our framework synthesises realistic soundscapes by combining clean background noise with isolated target vocalisations (little owl), automatically generating dynamic labels like bounding boxes during synthesis. A model fine-tuned on this data generalised well to real-world soundscapes, with performance remaining high even when the diversity of source vocalisations was drastically reduced, indicating the model learned generalised features without overfitting. This demonstrates that synthetic data generation is a highly effective strategy for training robust bioacoustic detectors from small source datasets. The approach significantly reduces manual labelling effort, overcoming a key bottleneck in computational bioacoustics and enhancing ecological assessment capabilities.
title Robust Bioacoustic Detection via Richly Labelled Synthetic Soundscape Augmentation
topic Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16235