Visual Fingerprints of the Acoustic Environment: The Use of Acoustic Indices to Characterise Natural Habitats

Mangalam Sankupellay, Michael Towsey, Anthony Truskinger, Paul Roe
2015 2015 Big Data Visual Analytics (BDVA)  
Acoustic recordings play an increasingly important role in monitoring terrestrial environments. However, due to rapid advances in technology, ecologists are accumulating more audio than they can listen to. Our approach to this big-data challenge is to visualize the content of long-duration audiorecordings by calculating acoustic indices. These are statistics which describe the temporal-spectral distribution of acoustic energy and reflect content of ecological interest. We combine spectral
more » ... s to produce false-color spectrogram images. These not only reveal acoustic content but also facilitate navigation. An additional analytic challenge is to find appropriate descriptors to summarize the content of 24-hour recordings, so that it becomes possible to monitor long-term changes in the acoustic environment at a single location and to compare the acoustic environments of different locations. We describe a 24-hour 'acoustic-fingerprint' which shows some preliminary promise.
doi:10.1109/bdva.2015.7314306 dblp:conf/bdva/SankupellayTTR15 fatcat:zl6yymlz6fdhfgok2wq73cgk6a