Compensating class imbalance for acoustic chimpanzee detection with convolutional recurrent neural networks

Automatic detection systems are important in passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) systems, as these record large amounts of audio data which are infeasible for humans to evaluate manually. In this paper we evaluated methods for compensating class imbalance for deep-learning based automatic detection of acoustic chimpanzee calls. The prevalence of chimpanzee calls in natural habitats is very rare, i.e. databases feature a heavy imbalance between background and target calls. Such imbalances can have negative effects on classifier performances. We employed a state-of-the-art detection approach based on convolutional recurrent neural networks (CRNNs). We extended the detection pipeline through various stages for compensating class imbalance. These included (1) spectrogram denoising, (2) alternative loss functions, and (3) resampling. Our key findings are: (1) spectrogram denoising operations significantly improved performance for both target classes, (2) standard binary cross entropy reached the highest performance, and (3) manipulating relative class imbalance through resampling either decreased or maintained performance depending on the target class. Finally, we reached detection performances of 33% for drumming and 5% for vocalization, which is a >7 fold increase compared to previously published results. We conclude that supporting the network to learn decoupling noise conditions from foreground classes is of primary importance for increasing performance.

Overcoming the Distance Estimation Bottleneck in Camera Trap Distance Sampling

Biodiversity crisis is still accelerating. Estimating animal abundance is of critical importance to assess, for example, the consequences of land-use change and invasive species on species composition, or the effectiveness of conservation interventions. Camera trap distance sampling (CTDS) is a recently developed monitoring method providing reliable estimates of wildlife population density and abundance. However, in current applications of CTDS, the required camera-to-animal distance measurements are derived by laborious, manual and subjective estimation methods. To overcome this distance estimation bottleneck in CTDS, this study proposes a completely automatized workflow utilizing state-of-the-art methods of image processing and pattern recognition.