An Automated Acoustic System to Monitor and Classify Birds

"Collisions between aircraft and birds have become an increasing concern for human health and safety. More than four hundred people and over four hundred aircraft have been lost globally. To minimize the number of birdstikes, microphone arrays have beenused to monitor birds near the airport or some critical locations in the airspace. However, the range of existing arrays is only limited to a few hundred meters. Moreover, the identification performance in low signal-to-noise environment is notsatisfactory.Here Intelligent Automation, Incorporated (IAI) and its subcontractor, Prof. Dominic Ho of the University of Missouri, propose a novel system to improve bird monitoring and recognition system in noisy environments. First, a microphone dish concept isproposed that provides very directional and long range (a few thousand meters) acquisition of bird sounds, can simultaneously pick up and track sound from different directions, and the cost of the dish will be less than $100. Second, an efficientrecognition algorithm is proposed which consists of stages of data reduction and feature extraction, and classification using Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The overall system is suitable for real-time monitoring and recognition for a large number of birds. The proposed acoustic system involving a novel microphone dish and an efficient recognition system can have many applications, including birdstrike warning system, speech enhancement for aircraft pilots, policemen, firefighters, cellular phone users, etc.It can also be useful as a directional speaker system for underwater communications."