In this work, we examine the problem of efficiently preprocessing and denoising high volume environmental acoustic data, which is a necessary step in many bird monitoring tasks. Preprocessing is typically made up of multiple steps which are considered separately from each other. These are often resource intensive, particularly because the volume of data involved is high. We focus on addressing two challenges within this problem: how to combine existing preprocessing tasks while maximising the effectiveness of each step, and how to process this pipeline quickly and efficiently, so that it can be used to process high volumes of acoustic data. We describe a distributed system designed specifically for this problem, utilising a master-slave model with data parallelisation. By investigating the impact of individual preprocessing tasks on each other, and their execution times, we determine an efficient and accurate order for preprocessing tasks within the distributed system. We find that, using a single core, our pipeline executes 1.40 times faster compared to manually executing all preprocessing tasks. We then apply our pipeline in the distributed system and evaluate its performance. We find that our system is capable of preprocessing bird acoustic recordings at a rate of 174.8 seconds of audio per second of real time with 32 cores over 8 virtual machines, which is 21.76 times faster than a serial process.
History
Publication title
PLoS One
Volume
13
Issue
8
Article number
e0201542
Number
e0201542
Pagination
1-24
ISSN
1932-6203
Department/School
School of Information and Communication Technology
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Place of publication
United States
Rights statement
Copyright 2018 Brown et al. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Repository Status
Open
Socio-economic Objectives
Information systems, technologies and services not elsewhere classified