Bat detective - Deep learning tools for bat acoustic signal detection

Oisin Mac Aodha, Rory Gibb, Kate E. Barlow, Ella Browning, Michael Firman, Robin Freeman, Briana Harder, Libby Kinsey, Gary R. Mead, Stuart E. Newson, Ivan Pandourski, Stuart Parsons, Jon Russ, Abigel Szodoray-Paradi, Farkas Szodoray-Paradi, Elena Tilova, Mark A. Girolami, Gabriel J. Brostow, Kate E. Jones

Abstract: Author summary There is a critical need for robust and accurate tools to scale up biodiversity monitoring and to manage the impact of anthropogenic change. For example, the monitoring of bat species and their population dynamics can act as an important indicator of ecosystem health as they are particularly sensitive to habitat conversion and climate change. In this work we propose a fully automatic and efficient method for detecting bat echolocation calls in noisy audio recordings. We show that our approach is more accurate compared to existing algorithms and other commercial tools. Our method enables us to automatically estimate bat activity from multi-year, large-scale, audio monitoring programmes.