Left: A Songmeter audio recording device in H.J. Andrews experimental research forest.

Middle: A spectrogram representation of audio recorded in H.J.A., after applying noise reduction algorithms.

Right: Stream networks and data collection sites in H.J.A.

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Oregon State Univeristy Bioacoustics Group

About Us

The OSU bioacoustics group is an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in ecology and machine learning, under the umbrella of the
IGERT ecoinformatics program. Our goal is to better understand bird populations in the H.J. Andrews long term experimental research forest, through computational analysis of audio data.

This summer, Matthew Betts, Sarah Frey and Adam Hadley deployed 15 Songmeters to record bird sounds in H.J. Andrews. These devices collected over 1 terabyte of audio data, 20 minutes per hour, 24 hours a day, at sites with varying altitutes and vegetation.

The challenge now is to develop algorithms to automatically identify which species of birds are present in an audio recording. Solving this problem will allow us to create maps of bird activity at an unprecedented temporal resolution. Raviv Raich, Xiaoli Fern, Forrest Briggs, and Balaji Lakshminarayanan have been working on the problem of automatic species recognition from audio data. We developed accurate and efficient algorithms for Bayesian classification of audio (see publications below). Audio data from H.J.A. poses many challenges for machine learning, such as noise from streams, wind and vehicles, and multiple species of birds vocalizing simultaneously. Future work will include statistical models for audio classification, classification in noisy environments with multiple sound sources, scaling machine learning algorithms to large data sets, and active learning (to minimize human labeling effort).

  • Faculty

    • Matthew Betts, Assistant Professor, Forest Wildlife Landscape Ecology, OSU
    • Raviv Raich, Assistant Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, OSU
    • Xiaoli Fern, Assistant Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, OSU
  • Students

  • Collaborators

    • Dave Mellinger, Associate Professor, Senior Research Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies, Hatfield Marine Science Center, OSU
    • Jed Irvine, Faculty Research Assistant, OSU

Peer Reviewed Publications

Technical Reports