Birdsong Detection at the Edge with Deep Learning

Understanding the distribution of bird species and populations and learning how birds behave and communicate are of great importance in wildlife biology, animal ecology, conservation of ecosystems, and assessing the effects of climate change and urbanization. The temporal and spatial limitations of human observation have motivated significant efforts to develop technology for bird song and vocalization detection and classification. While solutions based on signal processing and machine learning are extant, they are limited in various combinations of speed, computational complexity, and memory use, as well as in detection/classification capability in real-world conditions. This paper introduces ToucaNet, a deep neural network for birdsong detection based on transfer-learning, a deep learning mechanism allowing us to exploit knowledge acquired on various tasks: this enables us to speed up training and shows improved detection accuracy. ToucaNet provides birdsong detection accuracy in line with the best solutions in the literature but with much less computational complexity and memory demand. We also introduce BarbNet, an approximated version of ToucaNet tailored for Internet-of-Things (IoT) units. We show the proposed solution’s effectiveness and efficiency in terms of detection accuracy and the implementation feasibility in real-world IoT devices, with specific results for the STM32 Nucleo H7 board, which is based on an ARM Cortex-M7 processor. To our best knowledge, this is the first birdsong detection algorithm designed to take into account constraints on memory, computational speed, and power usage of embedded devices. Thus, this work points the way to cost-effective IoT technology for at-scale intelligent birdsong data collection and analysis in the field.