Feature Representations for Conservation Bioacoustics: Review and Discussion

Abstract: Acoustic analysis is becoming a key element of environmental monitoring for wildlife conservation. Passive acoustic recorders can document a variety of vocal animals over large areas and long time horizons, paving the path for machine learning algorithms to identify individual species, estimate abundance, and evaluate ecosystem health. How- ever, such techniques rely on finding meaningful characterizations of calls and soundscapes, capable of capturing complex spatiotemporal, taxonomic, and behavioral structure. This article reviews existing methods for computing informative lower- dimensional features in the context of terrestrial passive acoustic monitoring, and discusses directions for further work.