Biodiv Sci ›› 2024, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (10): 24121.  DOI: 10.17520/biods.2024121  cstr: 32101.14.biods.2024121

• Technology and Methodologies •     Next Articles

Wetland soundscape recording scheme and feature selection for soundscape classification

Wanjun Hu1, Zezhou Hao2(), Canwei Xia3(), Jiangjian Xie1,4,5,*()()   

  1. 1. School of Technology, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
    2. Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Guangzhou 510520, China
    3. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
    4. State Key Laboratory of Efficient Production of Forest Resources, Beijing 100083, China
    5. Research Center for Biodiversity Intelligent Monitoring, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
  • Received:2024-03-30 Accepted:2024-05-28 Online:2024-10-20 Published:2024-07-16
  • Contact: *E-mail: shyneforce@bjfu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(62303063)

Abstract:

Aims: Soundscape describes the spatial and temporal patterns of biodiversity, human activities, and other sounds, reflecting important anthropogenic and ecological processes. Soundscape classification not only helps improve the accuracy of calculating and analyzing different soundscape components, but also helps researchers gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics and distribution of different sounds, thus providing a basis for protecting and improving the ecological environment by offering a deeper understanding of species composition in an ecosystem. However, the large number of recordings collected by passive acoustic devices poses difficulties in analyzing soundscape data. This study aims to explore an efficient recording scheme that balances the amount of sampling data with the sampling cost to achieve the most productive outcome for soundscape classification research.

Methods: This study takes the recording data of Yeyahu Wetland Park of Beijing as the research object, compares the performance of seven acoustic indices (acoustic complexity index (ACI), acoustic diversity index (ADI), acoustic evenness index (AEI), bioacoustic index (BIO), acoustic entropy index (H), median of the amplitude envelope (M), normalized difference sound index (NDSI)) and BYOL-A (bootstrap your own latent for audio) features by different recording schemes, and explores appropriate recording schemes and acoustic features for soundscape classification (biophony, geophony, anthrophony).

Results: (1) Uniformly collecting 10 1-min sub-samples per hour could effectively capture soundscape information and balances data volume and cost (Spearman correlation coefficient ρ > 0.9). (2) Among the multiple acoustic indices, ACI and H were the most stable indices. (3) BYOL-A features were more effective in completing soundscape classification than acoustic indices.

Conclusion: Appropriate recording scheme and high-performance deep learning features such as BYOL-A features can quickly capture soundscape information and help improve the accuracy of soundscape classification. This study is expected to provide a guideline for soundscape data collection and acoustic feature selection in future research.

Key words: wetland, soundscape classification, acoustic indices, self-supervised learning, acoustic monitoring