Lina Stanković

Laia Garrobé Fonollosa, Douglas Gillespie, Lina Stankovic et al.

Bioacoustic data from Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) generates large datasets where obtaining detailed auditing and labelling is often impractical, resulting in weak annotations (e.g., presence/absence of species over several minutes of recording). In order to effectively capture the complex temporal patterns and key features of long audio segments, we propose a framework comprising dataset standardisation, feature extraction, and classification via Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN). This approach eliminates the necessity for setting heuristic decision rules or creating time-consuming strong labels. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we use sperm whale (\textit{Physeter macrocephalus}) click trains in 4-minute recordings as a case study, from a dataset comprising diverse sources and deployment conditions to maximise generalisability. Our TCN classifiers achieve recall rates exceeding 0.83 at a 0.13 false positive rate, comparable to agreement rates between expert annotators. We compare two methods of feature extraction, Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) and traditional handpicking of features, and found them to yield similar performance results, with the VAE-based classifiers seeing a more stable performance across datasets and recording conditions. These results offer a way forward in leveraging numerous existing annotated bioacoustic datasets to train automatic classification models, effectively overcoming previous limitations associated with weak labels.

Minxiang Ye, Vladimir Stankovic, Lina Stankovic et al.

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based feature learning has become state of the art, since given sufficient training data, CNN can significantly outperform traditional methods for various classification tasks. However, feature learning becomes more difficult if some training labels are noisy. With traditional regularization techniques, CNN often overfits to the noisy training labels, resulting in sub-par classification performance. In this paper, we propose a robust binary classifier, based on CNNs, to learn deep metric functions, which are then used to construct an optimal underlying graph structure used to clean noisy labels via graph Laplacian regularization (GLR). GLR is posed as a convex maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem solved via convex quadratic programming (QP). To penalize samples around the decision boundary, we propose two regularized loss functions for semi-supervised learning. The binary classification experiments on three datasets, varying in number and type of features, demonstrate that given a noisy training dataset, our proposed networks outperform several state-of-the-art classifiers, including label-noise robust support vector machine, CNNs with three different robust loss functions, model-based GLR, and dynamic graph CNN classifiers.