EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 96706, 19 pages
doi:10.1155/ASP/2006/96706

An Automated Acoustic System to Monitor and Classify Birds

C. Kwan,1 K. C. Ho,2 G. Mei,1 Y. Li,2 Z. Ren,1 R. Xu,1 Y. Zhang,1 D. Lao,1 M. Stevenson,1 V. Stanford,3 and C. Rochet3

 1Intelligent Automation, Inc., 15400 Calhoun Drive, Suite 400, Rockville 20855, MD, USA
2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Missouri-Columbia, 349 Engineering Building West, Columbia 65211, MO, USA
3National Institute of Standards and Technology, Building 225, Room A216, Gaithersburg 20899, MD, USA
Received 4 May 2005; Revised 3 October 2005; Accepted 11 October 2005

Recommended by Hugo Van hamme

Abstract

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.