Identifying patterns of human and bird activities using bioacoustic data

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.