AudioProtoPNet: An Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Bird Sound Classification

Abstract

Deep learning models have significantly advanced acoustic bird monitoring by recognizing numerous bird species based on their vocalizations. However, traditional deep learning models are often "black boxes," providing limited insight into their underlying computations, which restricts their utility for ornithologists and machine learning engineers. Explainable models, on the other hand, can facilitate debugging, knowledge discovery, trust, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

This work introduces AudioProtoPNet, an adaptation of the Prototypical Part Network (ProtoPNet) designed for multi-label bird sound classification. AudioProtoPNet is inherently interpretable, leveraging a ConvNeXt backbone to extract embeddings and a prototype learning classifier trained on these embeddings. The classifier learns prototypical patterns of each bird species' vocalizations from spectrograms of instances in the training data.

During inference, recordings are classified by comparing them to learned prototypes in the embedding space, providing explanations for the model's decisions and insights into the most informative embeddings of each bird species.

• Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954125000901

Model Description

Training Data

The model was trained on the BirdSet training dataset, which comprises 9734 bird species and over 6800 hours of recordings.

Evaluation

AudioProtoPNet's performance was evaluated on seven BirdSet test datasets, covering diverse geographical regions. The model demonstrated superior performance compared to state-of-the-art bird sound classification models like Perch (which itself outperforms BirdNet). AudioProtoPNet achieved an average AUROC of 0.90 and a cmAP of 0.42, representing relative improvements of 7.1% and 16.7% over Perch, respectively.

These results highlight the feasibility of developing powerful yet interpretable deep learning models for the challenging task of multi-label bird sound classification, offering valuable insights for professionals in ornithology and machine learning.

Evaluation Results

Table 1: Mean Performance of AudioProtoPNet Models with Varying Prototypes

Mean performance of AudioProtoPNet models with one, five, ten, and twenty prototypes per class for the validation dataset POW and the seven test datasets, averaged over five different random seeds. The 'Score' column represents the average of the respective metric across all test datasets. Best values for each metric are bolded. While models with five, ten, and twenty prototypes performed similarly, the model with only one prototype per class showed slightly lower performance.

Table 2: Comparative Performance of AudioProtoPNet, ConvNeXt, and Perch

Mean performance of AudioProtoPNet-5, ConvNeXt, and Perch for the validation dataset POW and the seven test datasets, averaged over five different random seeds. The 'Score' column represents the average of the respective metric across all test datasets. Best values for each metric are bolded. AudioProtoPNet-5 notably outperformed both Perch and ConvNeXt in terms of cmAP, AUROC, and top-1 accuracy scores.

Example

This model can be easily loaded and used for inference with the transformers library.

from transformers import AutoFeatureExtractor, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import librosa
import torch

# Load the model and feature extractor
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("DBD-research-group/AudioProtoPNet-1-BirdSet-XCL",trust_remote_code=True)
feature_extractor = AutoFeatureExtractor.from_pretrained("DBD-research-group/AudioProtoPNet-1-BirdSet-XCL", trust_remote_code=True)
model.eval()

# Load an example audio file
audio_path = librosa.ex('robin')
label = "eurrob1"  # The eBird label for the European Robin.

# The model is trained on audio sampled at 32,000 Hz
audio, sample_rate = librosa.load(audio_path, sr=32_000)

mel_spectrogram = feature_extractor(audio)

outputs = model(mel_spectrogram)
probabilities = torch.sigmoid(outputs[0]).detach()

# Get the top 5 predictions by confidence
top_n_probs, top_n_indices = torch.topk(probabilities, k=5, dim=-1)

label2id = model.config.label2id
id2label = model.config.id2label

print(f'Selected species with confidence:')
print(f"{label:<7} - {probabilities[:, label2id[label]].item():.2%}")
print("\nTop 5 Predictions with confidence:")
for idx, conf in zip(top_n_indices.squeeze(), top_n_probs.squeeze()):
    print(f"{id2label[idx.item()]:<7} - {conf:.2%}")

Expected output

Selected species with confidence:
eurrob1 - 28.77%
Top 5 Predictions with confidence:
sablar2 - 52.56%
coatit2 - 40.92%
verdin  - 40.21%
blutit  - 39.58%
palwar5 - 35.82%

More Details

For more details refer to our paper at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954125000901

Citation

@misc{heinrich2024audioprotopnet,
      title={AudioProtoPNet: An interpretable deep learning model for bird sound classification}, 
      author={René Heinrich and Lukas Rauch and Bernhard Sick and Christoph Scholz},
      year={2024},
      url={https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954125000901}, 
}