Acoustic auto-encoders for biodiversity assessment

Continuous audio recordings are playing an ever more important role in conservation and biodiversity monitoring, however, listening to these recordings is often infeasible, as they can be thousands of hours long. Automating analysis using machine learning algorithms requires a feature representation. In this paper we propose a technique for learning a general feature representation from unlabelled audio using auto-encoders, which can be used for analysing environmental audio on a small timescale. We start by segmenting the audio data into non-overlapping 1-s long chunks and generating audio spectrograms. These audio spectrograms are then used to train a basic auto-encoder, with the output of the encoder network being used to generate the feature representation. We have found that at a 1-s timescale, our feature representation offers marginal improvements over ?acoustic indices?, a common representation for analysing environmental audio.