Western Mediterranean Wetland Birds dataset: A new annotated dataset for acoustic bird species classification

The deployment of an expert system running over a wireless acoustic sensors network made up of bioacoustic monitoring devices that recognize bird species from their sounds would enable the automation of many tasks of ecological value, including the analysis of bird population composition or the detection of endangered species in areas of environmental interest. Endowing these devices with accurate audio classification capabilities is possible thanks to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, among which deep learning techniques stand out. To train such algorithms, data from the sources to be classified is required. For this reason, this paper presents the Western Mediterranean Wetland Birds (WMWB) dataset, consisting of 201.6 min and 5795 annotated audio excerpts of 20 endemic bird species of the Aiguamolls de l'Empordà Natural Park. The main objective of this work is to describe and analyze this new dataset. Moreover, this work presents the results of bird species classification experiments using four well- known deep neural networks fine-tuned on our dataset, whose models are also made public along with the dataset. These results are aimed to serve as a performance baseline reference for the community when using the WMWB dataset for their experiments.