Automatic Classification of a Taxon-Rich Community Recorded in the Wild

There is a rich literature on automatic species identification of a specific target taxon as regards various vocalizing animals. Research usually is restricted to specific species – in most cases a single one. It is only very recently that the number of monitored species has started to increase for certain habitats involving birds. Automatic acoustic monitoring has not yet been proven to be generic enough to scale to other taxa and habitats than the ones described in the original research. Although attracting much attention, the acoustic monitoring procedure is neither well established yet nor universally adopted as a biodiversity monitoring tool. Recently, the multi-instance multi-label framework on bird vocalizations has been introduced to face the obstacle of simultaneously vocalizing birds of different species. We build on this framework to integrate novel, image-based heterogeneous features designed to capture different aspects of the spectrum. We applied our approach to a taxon-rich habitat that included 78 birds, 8 insect species and 1 amphibian. This dataset constituted the Multi-label Bird Species Classification Challenge-NIPS 2013 where the proposed approach achieved an average accuracy of 91.25% on unseen data.