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A tool for labelling individual sounds from continuous recordings: An application to bio-acoustics

Book Contribution - Book Chapter Conference Contribution

Bio-acoustics is a common tool for studying health, welfare and behavior of living organisms. Current practice consists of manually extracting and labelling individual sounds out of continuous recordings. This paper presents an application tool for speeding up bio-acoustical analysis. In particular, a semi-automatic tool has been developed that enables the extraction of individual sounds from continuous recordings. Although the approach can be applied to any kind of recordings, in the present study, the focus is on extracting individual pig sounds from recordings within a pig stable. More specifically, the sound extraction is based on the amplitude of the sound signal. The energy envelope of the signal is automatically extracted using the Hilbert transform on the discrete time signals. Subsequently, the individual sounds are presented to the user for manual labelling. The front-end provides the user with tools to adjust the length of the individual sounds since it is understood that in various cases a longer or shorter part of the signal may have been identified as an individual sound. The user also has an overview of the complete recording, the number of identified sounds, and the spread of the sounds within the continuous recording. Finally, the user is allowed to label using a predefined gamut of sounds or adding a sound category that has not been foreseen, making it a flexible tool. The labeling tool also allows the integration of an automatic sound classifier in the future and can be used for both training and/or validating algorithms under development. At a later stage the tool can be connected either online or offline to a web-based database that can allow for a collection of labeled sounds to be created.
Book: American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers Annual International Meeting 2009, ASABE 2009
Pages: 4010 - 4016
ISBN:9781615673629
Publication year:2009