The
software analyses spectrogram recordings, or the visual representations of
sound waves, of bush sounds.
A variety
of native birds can be likely heard by anyone who wanders into the New Zealand
bush. However, identifying which bird is which, especially if they imitate each
other, will not be easy.
A
Professor from Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Mathematics and
Statistics, together with his research team, had created software that can
analyse sound recordings from the New Zealand bush and deduce the abundance of
various types of birds.
According
to a recent press
release, AviaNZ allows them to monitor the health of bird populations
without affecting their behaviours.
What can
the software do?
Additionally,
the technology could also monitor pests and predators by changing the types of
recorders being used.
It could
also be an excellent way to gauge the predator stress on a particular area.
The
software can be trained to recognise any sound. As long as the predators are
talking to each other and the microphone is close enough, it will be able to
detect them.
The team
have successfully trained the software to detect two types of native bats,
which are inaudible to humans.
The
software analyses spectrogram recordings, or the visual representations of
sound waves, of bush sounds.
It then
learns the sound waves patterns that represent each bird call and can count how
many of those bird calls occur.
It is not
as good as an expert human, who is concentrating hard at discerning the different
calls. However, it is quite difficult for a human to maintain concentration to
any 8-hour recording, while most of it is nothing, with no calls at all.
The
software, on the other hand, does not care. Plus, it is very fast. A 15-minute
recording takes it about a minute to process.
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