Tadarida: A Toolbox for Animal Detection on Acoustic Recordings

• Main Authors: Yves Bas, Didier Bas, Jean-François Julien
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ubiquity Press 2017-02-01
• Series: Journal of Open Research Software
• Subjects: Acoustic Recording Unit (ARU); bioacoustics; animal calls classification; ecoacoustic indices; environmental sound; machine learning; random forest; sound event detection; species monitoring
• Online Access: http://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/articles/154

Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) recently extended to a very wide range of animals, but no available open software has been sufficiently generic to automatically treat several taxonomic groups. Here we present Tadarida, a software toolbox allowing for the detection and labelling of recorded sound events, and to classify any new acoustic data into known classes. It is made up of three modules handling Detection, Labelling and Classification and running on either Linux or Windows. This development resulted in the first open software (1) allowing generic sound event detection (multi-taxa), (2) providing graphical sound labelling at a single-instance level and (3) covering the whole process from sound detection to classification. This generic and modular design opens numerous reuse opportunities among (bio)acoustics researchers, especially for those managing and/or developing PAM schemes. The whole toolbox is openly developed in C++ (Detection and Labelling) and R (Classification) and stored at <a href="https://github.com/YvesBas" target="_blank">https://github.com/YvesBas</a>.