Computational Sustainability

Machine Learning for Passive Acoustic Wildlife Monitoring: Methods for Semi-Automated Population and Species Assessment

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has become a powerful tool for studying wildlife by continuously recording environmental soundscapes. However, analysing large acoustic datasets remains highly time-consuming, as recordings are often annotated manually by domain experts. In this work, we investigate how machine learning can support scalable biodiversity monitoring by enabling efficient Read more

By Franziska Scheurer, ago

Grounded Label Space Engineering for Knowledge-Centric Annotation Workflows

Building reliable AI models depends not only on how much data is annotated, but on the quality and meaning of the labels used during annotation. In many workflows, labels are flat, task-specific class names. They are easy to apply, but lack explicit semantic structure, provenance, and links to shared domain Read more

By Franziska Scheurer, ago

IQUANA: Efficient Image Annotation and Quantification

Image annotation remains a significant bottleneck in image analysis pipelines. In research settings especially, annotating large image corpora demands substantial effort, often forcing teams to compromise on quality by resorting to coarser methods like point annotations rather than full outlines. To address this, we collaborated with the Helmholtz Institute for Read more

By Franziska Scheurer, ago

Semi-Supervised Learning With Local Prototype Networks

Detecting animal sounds is an essential aspect of scientific research and conservation efforts. It provides valuable insights into biodiversity, species behavior, and ecosystem health. Monitoring of terrestrial and marine wildlife is a way to decrease biodiversity loss and improve species conservation. To achieve this goal passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is Read more

By Franziska Scheurer, ago

Interactive annotation of passive acoustic monitoring datasets

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), the recording of sounds using microphones (e.g. in biosphere reserves), is an increasingly popular method for continuous, reproducible, scalable and cost-effective monitoring of wildlife [Sugai et al., 2018]. It is widely employed in various fields, including ecology, marine biology, and conservation, to study animal behavior, biodiversity, Read more

By Franziska Scheurer, ago