News (June 2009)
PhD Opportunity
School of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Birmingham
Automatic Recognition of Bird Species from Birdsong
The School of Electronic, Electrical and Computer
Engineering at the University of Birmingham has funding for a PhD
project in the automatic recognition of bird species from their
song. The project will be undertaken in collaboration with Biocensus,
an ecological consultancy providing a range of services to commercial
and public sector clients (see www.biocensus.co.uk). The objective
is to create an automatic system which can detect individual occurrences
of the song of a particular species of bird over a period of several
days, in order to establish whether or not that species is resident
in the locality and, if so, to estimate the population size.
The project will involve applying pattern recognition techniques
which have been demonstrated to be effective for computer speech
recognition to birdsong. More specifically, the project will involve:
- Selecting or developing microphone configurations suitable for
capturing birdsong,
- Collecting a database of birdsong 'in the field', focussing
initial on the Black Redstart population in Birmingham
- Understanding the structure of birdsong sufficiently well to
propose signal processing methods which can extract features from
birdsong which are suitable for species classification,
- Applying techniques from automatic speech recognition, such
as hidden Markov models (HMMs) and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs)
to birdsong data
- Applying noise-robustness techniques from computer speech recognition
to the birdsong data, in order to make the classification process
less sensitive to environmental noise
- Off-line evaluation of the system using the database
- Development of a prototype system and its evaluation in the
field.
The project will be supervised jointly by Professor Martin Russell
(www.eee.bham.ac.uk/russellm) and Dr Peter Jancovic (www.eee.bham.ac.uk/Jancovic).
Biocensus will provide guidance on birdsong location, recognition
and recording.
Funding sufficient to cover the cost of home fees plus £12,900
maintenance is available for a UK student only.
If you are interested please contact Martin Russell (m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk)
or Peter Jancovic (p.jancovic@bham.ac.uk) for further information.
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