Overview of BirdCLEF 2020: Bird Sound Recognition in Complex Acoustic Environments

Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improvement of automated assessment systems has the potential to have a transformative impact on global biodiversity monitoring, at a scale and level of detail that is impossible with manual annotation or other more traditional methods. The BirdCLEF challenge—as part of the 2020 LifeCLEF Lab [12]—focuses on the development of reliable detection systems for avian vocalizations in continuous soundscape data. The goal of the task is to localize and identify all audible birds within the provided soundscape test set. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

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