Ecology & computer audition: Applications of audio technology to monitor organisms and environment
Björn W. Schuller,
Alican Akman,
Yi Chang,
Harry Coppock,
Alexander Gebhard,
Alexander Kathan,
Esther Rituerto-González,
Andreas Triantafyllopoulos,
Florian B. Pokorny
Affiliations
Björn W. Schuller
GLAM – Group on Language, Audio, & Music, Imperial College London, UK; EIHW – Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, Germany; audEERING GmbH, Gilching, Germany; Corresponding author. GLAM – Group on Language, Audio, & Music, Imperial College London, UK.
Alican Akman
GLAM – Group on Language, Audio, & Music, Imperial College London, UK
Yi Chang
GLAM – Group on Language, Audio, & Music, Imperial College London, UK
Harry Coppock
GLAM – Group on Language, Audio, & Music, Imperial College London, UK
Alexander Gebhard
EIHW – Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, Germany
Alexander Kathan
EIHW – Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, Germany
Esther Rituerto-González
EIHW – Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, Germany; GPM – Group of Multimedia Processing, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain
Andreas Triantafyllopoulos
EIHW – Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, Germany
Florian B. Pokorny
EIHW – Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, Germany; Division of Phoniatrics, Medical University of Graz, Austria
Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed within the 2030 Agenda and adopted by all the United Nations member states, the 13th SDG is a call for action to combat climate change. Moreover, SDGs 14 and 15 claim the protection and conservation of life below water and life on land, respectively. In this work, we provide a literature-founded overview of application areas, in which computer audition – a powerful but in this context so far hardly considered technology, combining audio signal processing and machine intelligence – is employed to monitor our ecosystem with the potential to identify ecologically critical processes or states. We distinguish between applications related to organisms, such as species richness analysis and plant health monitoring, and applications related to the environment, such as melting ice monitoring or wildfire detection. This work positions computer audition in relation to alternative approaches by discussing methodological strengths and limitations, as well as ethical aspects. We conclude with an urgent call to action to the research community for a greater involvement of audio intelligence methodology in future ecosystem monitoring approaches.
