# Automatic acoustic detection of birds through deep learning: the first Bird Audio Detection challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.05812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05812/

## Key facts

- Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 44)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Assessing the presence and abundance of birds is important for monitoring specific species as well as overall ecosystem health. Many birds are most readily detected by their sounds, and thus passive acoustic monitoring is highly appropriate. Yet acoustic monitoring is often held back by practical limitations such as the need for manual configuration, reliance on example sound libraries, low accuracy, low robustness, and limited ability to generalise to novel acoustic conditions. Here we report outcomes from a collaborative data challenge showing that with modern machine learning including deep learning, general-purpose acoustic bird detection can achieve very high retrieval rates in remote monitoring data --- with no manual recalibration, and no pre-training of the detector for the target species or the acoustic conditions in the target environment. Multiple methods were able to attain performance of around 88% AUC (area under the ROC curve), much higher performance than previous general-purpose methods. We present new acoustic monitoring datasets, summarise the machine learning techniques proposed by challenge teams, conduct detailed performance evaluation, and discuss how such approaches to detection can be integrated into remote monitoring projects.