Identifying Patterns of Human and Bird Activities Using Bioacoustic Data

Renjie Li,Saurabh Garg,Alexander Brown

doi:10.3390/f10100917

Abstract

In general, humans and animals often interact within the same environment at the same time. Human activities may disturb or affect some bird activities. Therefore, it is important to monitor and study the relationships between human and animal activities. This paper proposed a system able not only to automatically classify human and bird activities using bioacoustic data, but also to automatically summarize patterns of events over time. To perform automatic summarization of acoustic events, a frequency–duration graph (FDG) framework was proposed to summarize the patterns of human and bird activities. This system first performs data pre-processing work on raw bioacoustic data and then applies a support vector machine (SVM) model and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model to classify human and bird chirping activities before using the FDG framework to summarize results. The SVM model achieved 98% accuracy on average and the MLP model achieved 98% accuracy on average across several day-long recordings. Three case studies with real data show that the FDG framework correctly determined the patterns of human and bird activities over time and provided both statistical and graphical insight into the relationships between these two events.

Highlights

Humans often interact with forests, which may disturb the activities of birds and other animals which live there; this interaction might disturb the biodiversity in these forests [1,2,3]
We proposed a novel frequency–duration graph (FDG) framework to summarize the patterns of different events in a forest environment based on bioacoustic data over time
This study addressed the problem of comparing and summarizing different event patterns over time by proposing a new system utilizing a novel frequency–duration graph (FDG) framework to automatically summarize how frequencies of different activities change over time

Summary

Introduction

Humans often interact with forests, which may disturb the activities of birds and other animals which live there; this interaction might disturb the biodiversity in these forests [1,2,3]. It is important to understand the relationships between bird and human activities in forests [4]. There is a demand for methods able to summarize the patterns of bird chirping and human activities in forest areas over time. Bioacoustics analysis could be used to address the challenge of monitoring and summarizing interactions between human and bird activity in forests. Analyzing and summarizing these data to provide insight into how human and bird activities affect each other has not been addressed until now

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Results

Conclusion