Computational Bioacoustic Scene Analysis

The analysis of natural and animal sound makes a demonstrable contribution to important challenges in conservation, animal behaviour, and evolution. And now bioacoustics has entered its big data era. Thus automation is important, as is scalability in many cases to very large amounts of audio data and to real-time processing. This chapter will focus on the data science and the computational methods that can enable this. Computational bioacoustics has some commonalities with wider audio scene analysis, as well as with speech processing and other disciplines. However, the tasks required and the specific characteristics of bioacoustic data require new and adapted techniques. This chapter will survey the tasks and the methods of computational bioacoustics, and will place particular emphasis on existing work and future prospects which address scalable analysis. We will mostly focus on airborne sound; there has also been much work on freshwater and marine bioacoustics, and a small amount on solid-borne sounds.