Birdsong recognition using backpropagation and multivariate statistics

An investigation has been made of bird species recognition using recordings of birdsong. Six species of birds native to Manitoba were chosen: song sparrows, fox sparrows, marsh wrens, sedge wrens, yellow warblers, and red-winged blackbirds. These species exhibit overlapping characteristics in terms of frequency content, song components, and length of songs. Songs from multiple individuals in each of these species were employed, with discernible recording noise such as tape hiss and, in some cases, other competing songs in the background. These songs were analyzed using backpropagation learning in two-layer perceptrons, as well as methods from multivariate statistics that included principal components and quadratic discriminant analysis. Preprocessing methods included linear predictive coding and windowed Fourier transforms. Generalization performance ranged from 82-93 % correct identification, with the lower figures corresponding to smaller networks employing more preprocessing for dimensionality reduction. At the same time, the computational requirements were significantly reduced in this case.