Acoustic evaluation of a neural network dedicated to the detection of animal vocalisations
This work addresses the need for acoustic performance evaluation in ecoacoustic monitoring, offering a domain-specific tool for researchers studying animal populations like Rock Ptarmigan.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating neural network-based animal vocalization detection systems by proposing an acoustic analysis method that relates signal-to-noise ratio to detection probability, enabling optimization of training and modeling of detection distance to estimate spatial density of calls.
The accessibility of long-duration recorders, adapted to sometimes demanding field conditions, has enabled the deployment of extensive animal population monitoring campaigns through ecoacoustics. The effectiveness of automatic signal detection methods, increasingly based on neural approaches, is frequently evaluated solely through machine learning metrics, while acoustic analysis of performance remains rare. As part of the acoustic monitoring of Rock Ptarmigan populations, we propose here a simple method for acoustic analysis of the detection system's performance. The proposed measure is based on relating the signal-to-noise ratio of synthetic signals to their probability of detection. We show how this measure provides information about the system and allows optimisation of its training. We also show how it enables modelling of the detection distance, thus offering the possibility of evaluating its dynamics according to the sound environment and accessing an estimation of the spatial density of calls.