PolyChirp: Multi-Species Birdsong Classification Using TinyML on Low-Power Acoustic Sensors
TL;DR
This work develops PolyChirp, an approach combining biological domain expertise, automated dataset curation, neural architecture optimization and novel hardware to achieve multiclass bird species detection in the wild using newly designed tiny multiclass models that leverage recent microcontrollers and hardware acceleration with a neural processing unit (NPU).
Abstract
Recent progress in the field of TinyML has demonstrated that low-power hardware based on microcontrollers can achieve bird species monitoring in real time based on acoustic sensor data for an entire breeding period on a single battery charge. However, the state of the art on low-power microcontrollers was so far limited to binary classification of a single species. In contrast, real fauna monitoring deployments often target multiple species simultaneously. To address this challenge we develop PolyChirp, an approach combining biological domain expertise, automated dataset curation, neural architecture optimization and novel hardware to achieve multiclass bird species detection in the wild. PolyChirp is based on newly designed tiny multiclass models that leverage recent microcontrollers and hardware acceleration with a neural processing unit (NPU). We evaluate the predictive performance of these models, and we measure their computational performance -- flash footprint, latency, energy consumption -- on common microcontroller hardware. Our results demonstrate that PolyChirp matches or exceeds the TinyChirp architectures retrained under our protocol on single-species detection, and further achieves robust classification of up to 10 species simultaneously (macro F2 up to 0.97), while still fitting the flash, latency and energy budget of a low-power microcontroller sensor. A data-driven front-end redesign additionally makes on-device mel feature extraction 7x to 11x cheaper.
