Automatic Bird Sound Source Separation Based on Passive Acoustic Devices in Wild Environment

The Internet of Things (IoT)-based passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has shown great potential in large-scale remote bird monitoring. However, field recordings often contain overlapping signals, making precise bird information extraction challenging. To solve this challenge, first, the interchannel spatial feature is chosen as complementary information to the spectral feature to obtain additional spatial correlations between the sources. Then, an end-to-end model named BACPPNet is built based on Deeplabv3plus and enhanced with the polarized self-attention mechanism to estimate the spectral magnitude mask (SMM) for separating bird vocalizations. Finally, the separated bird vocalizations are recovered from SMMs and the spectrogram of mixed audio using the inverse short Fourier transform (ISTFT). We evaluate our proposed method utilizing the generated mixed data set. Experiments have shown that our method can separate bird vocalizations from mixed audio with root mean square error (RMSE), source-to-distortion ratio (SDR), source-to-interference ratio (SIR), source-to-artifact ratio (SAR), and short-time objective intelligibility (STOI) values of 2.82, 10.00 dB, 29.90 dB, 11.08 dB, and 0.66, respectively, which are better than existing methods. Furthermore, the average classification accuracy of the separated bird vocalizations drops the least. This indicates that our method outperforms other compared separation methods in bird sound separation and preserves the fidelity of the separated sound sources, which might help us better understand wild bird sound recordings.