An Automated Acoustic System to Monitor and Classify Birds

Author(s)

C. Kwan, K C. Ho, G. Mei, Y Li, Z. Ren, R. Xu, Y. Zhang, R. Lao, M. Stevenson, Vincent M. Stanford, C. Rochet

Abstract

This paper presents a novel bird monitoring and recognition system in noisy environments. The project objective is to avoid bird strikes to aircraft. First, a cost effective microphone dish concept (microphone array with many concentric rings) is presented that can provide directional and accurate acquisition of bird sounds and can simultaneously pick up bird sounds from different directions. Second, Direction of Arrival (DOA) and beamforming algorithms have been developed for the circular array. Third, an efficient recognition algorithm is proposed which uses Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The overall system is suitable for monitoring and recognition for a large number of birds. Fourth, a hardware prototype has been built and initial experiments demonstrated that the array can acquire and classify birds accurately.

Citation

Eurasip Journal on Applied Signal Processing

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

Circular microphone array, bird classification, beamforming, DOA estimation

Citation

Kwan, C. , Ho, K. , Mei, G. , Li, Y. , Ren, Z. , Xu, R. , Zhang, Y. , Lao, R. , Stevenson, M. , Stanford, V. and Rochet, C. (1970), An Automated Acoustic System to Monitor and Classify Birds, Eurasip Journal on Applied Signal Processing (Accessed October 12, 2025)