Introduction
The first year of the BioDCASE challenge includes three tasks - Multi-channel audio alignment, marine mammal detection and bioacoustics on tiny hardware. More information about the challenges will be released soon.
Tasks
Multi-Channel Alignment
Researchers often deploy multiple audio recorders simultaneously, for example with passive automated recording units (ARU's) or embedded in animal-borne bio-loggers. Analysing sounds simultaneously captured by multiple recorders can provide insights into animal positions and numbers, as well as the dynamics of communication in groups. However, many of these devices are susceptible to desynchronization due to nonlinear clock drift, which can diminish researchers' ability to glean useful insights. Therefore, a reliable, post-processing-based re-synchronization method would increase usability of collected data.
In this challenge, participants will be presented with pairs of temporally desynchronized recordings and asked to design a system to synchronize them in time. In the development phase, participants will be provided audio pairs and a small set of ground-truth synchronization key points--the likes of which could be produced by a manual review of the data. In the evaluation phase, participants' systems will be ranked by their ability to synchronize unseen audio pairs.
Organizers
Becky Heath
University of Cambridge
Supervised detection of strongly-labelled Antarctic blue and fin whale calls
Antarctic blue (balaenoptera musculus) and fin (balaenoptera physalus) whales were nearly wiped out during industrial whaling. For the past sixteen years, the Acoustic Trends Working Group of the Southern Ocean Research Partnership of the International Whaling Commission have been using long term underwater passive acoustic monitoring to examine trends in the population growth, abundance, distribution, seasonal movements, and behaviour of these species.
Within this project, we designed a supervised multi-class sound event detection task with strong labels, which depict the start and end time of the events, applied to the detection of 6 different call types from those two whale species. These calls happen only 6% of the time, on average, and can thus be considered rare. This task aims to challenge and assess the ability of models to adapt and perform in varying marine acoustic environments, reflecting the real-world variability encountered in marine mammal monitoring. To this end, Antarctica appeared to us as a very exciting playground to start a large-scale testing of model generalization capacity!
Organizers
Olivier Adam
Sorbonne Université, LAM
Paul Carvaillo
France Energies Marines
Anatole Gros-Martial
Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, GEO-Ocean
Lucie Jean-Labadye
Sorbonne Université, LAM
Brian Miller
Australian Antarctic Division
Paul Nguyen Hong Duc
Curtin University
Pierre-Yves le Rolland Raumer
IUEM
Bioacoustics for Tiny Hardware
The next generation of autonomous recording units contains programmable chips, thus offering the opportunity the opportunity to perform BioDCASE tasks. On-device processing has multiple advantages, such as high durability, low latency, and privacy preservation. However, such “tiny hardware” is limited in terms of memory and compute, which calls for the development of original methods in audio content analysis. In this context, task participants will revisit the well-known problem of automatic detection of birdsong while adjusting their systems so as to meet the specifications of a commercially available microcontroller.
Organizers
