Animal Species Classification from Vocalizations Using Cochlear-Inspired Audio Features and Machine Learning

Biomimetic approaches have gained increasing attention in the development of efficient computational models for sound scene analysis. In this paper, we present a sound-based animal species classification method inspired by the auditory processing mechanisms of the human cochlea. The approach employs gammatone filtering to extract features that capture the distinctive characteristics of animal vocalizations. While gammatone filterbanks themselves are well established in auditory signal processing, their systematic application and evaluation for animal vocalization classification represent the main contribution of this work. Four gammatone-based feature representations are explored and used to train and test an artificial neural network for species classification. The method is evaluated on a dataset comprising vocalizations from 13 animal species with 50 vocalizations per specie and 2.76 seconds per vocalization in average. The evaluations are conducted to study the system parameters in different conditions and system architectures. Although the dataset is limited in scale compared to larger public databases, the results highlight the potential of combining biomimetic cochlear filtering with machine learning to perform reliable and robust species classification through sound.