An Automated Acoustic System to Monitor and Classify Birds

This paper presents a novel bird monitoring and recognition system in noisy environments. The project objective is to avoid bird strikes to aircraft. First, a cost-effective microphone dish concept (microphone array with many concentric rings) is presented that can provide directional and accurate acquisition of bird sounds and can simultaneously pick up bird sounds from different directions. Second, direction-of-arrival (DOA) and beamforming algorithms have been developed for the circular array. Third, an efficient recognition algorithm is proposed which uses Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). The overall system is suitable for monitoring and recognition for a large number of birds. Fourth, a hardware prototype has been built and initial experiments demonstrated that the array can acquire and classify birds accurately.