BirdVoxClassify: species classification of bird flight calls

An open-source Python library and command-line tool for classifying bird species from flight calls in audio recordings.

BirdVoxClassify is a pre-trained deep learning system for classifying bird species from flight calls in short audio recordings. It relies on per-channel energy normalization (PCEN) for improved robustness to background noise. It is made available both as a Python library and as a command-line tool for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Installation instructions

Dependencies

TensorFlow

Because TensorFlow comes in CPU-only and GPU-enabled variants, we leave it up to the user to install the version that best fits their use case.

On most platforms, either of the following commands should properly install TensorFlow:

pip install tensorflow # CPU-only version
pip install tensorflow-gpu # GPU-enabled version

For more detailed information, please consult the installation instructions of TensorFlow.

libsndfile (Linux only)

BirdVoxClassify depends on the PySoundFile module to load audio files, which itself depends on the non-Python library libsndfile. On Windows and Mac OS X, these will be installed automatically via the pip package manager and you can therefore skip this step. However, on Linux, libsndfile must be installed manually via your platform's package manager. For Debian-based distributions (such as Ubuntu), this can be done by simply running

apt-get install libsndfile

For more detailed information, please consult the installation instructions of pysoundfile.

Installing BirdVoxClassify

The simplest way to install BirdVoxClassify is by using pip, which will also install the additional required dependencies if needed.

To install the latest version of BirdVoxClassify from source:

1. Clone or pull the latest version:

    git clone git@github.com:BirdVox/birdvoxclassify.git
   

2. Install using pip to handle Python dependencies:

    cd birdvoxclassify
    pip install -e .