Analyzing big environmental audio with frequency preserving autoencoders

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 is in high demand. However, these algorithms require a feature representation. Several methods for generating feature representations for these data have been developed, using techniques such as domain-specific features and deep learning. However, domain-specific features are unlikely to be an ideal representation of the data and deep learning methods often require extensively labeled data.In this paper, we propose a method for generating a frequency-preserving autoencoder-based feature representation for unlabeled ecological audio. We evaluate multiple frequency-preserving autoencoder-based feature representations using a hierarchical clustering sample task. We compare this to a basic autoencoder feature representation, MFCC, and spectral acoustic indices. Experimental results show that some of these non-square autoencoder architectures compare well to these existing feature representations.This novel method for generating a feature representation for unlabeled ecological audio will offer a fast, general way for ecologists to generate a feature representation of their audio, which does not require extensively labeled data.