Active learning for bird sound classification via a kernel-based extreme learning machine.

Journal: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Published Date:

Abstract

In recent years, research fields, including ecology, bioacoustics, signal processing, and machine learning, have made bird sound recognition a part of their focus. This has led to significant advancements within the field of ornithology, such as improved understanding of evolution, local biodiversity, mating rituals, and even the implications and realities associated to climate change. The volume of unlabeled bird sound data is now overwhelming, and comparatively little exploration is being made into methods for how best to handle them. In this study, two active learning (AL) methods are proposed, sparse-instance-based active learning (SI-AL), and least-confidence-score-based active learning (LCS-AL), both effectively reducing the need for expert human annotation. To both of these AL paradigms, a kernel-based extreme learning machine (KELM) is then integrated, and a comparison is made to the conventional support vector machine (SVM). Experimental results demonstrate that, when the classifier capacity is improved from an unweighted average recall of 60%-80%, KELM can outperform SVM even when a limited proportion of human annotations are used from the pool of data in both cases of SI-AL (minimum 34.5% vs minimum 59.0%) and LCS-AL (minimum 17.3% vs minimum 28.4%).

Authors

  • Kun Qian
    Key Laboratory of Brain Health Intelligent Evaluation and Intervention (Beijing Institute of Technology), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China.
  • Zixing Zhang
    Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems, University of Passau, Innstr. 43, Passau 94032, Germany.
  • Alice Baird
    Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems, University of Passau, Innstr. 43, Passau 94032, Germany.
  • Björn Schuller
    Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care & Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, 86159 Augsburg, Germany.