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Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow

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Re: Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow

#71
post #30

Someone more familiar with satellites can correct me, but from my understanding you should be able to detect deforestation from real-time satellite data. You alert on changes in the level of greenery in the images. The indicator might trail behind detecting chainsaw noises, but it wouldn't require the mass distribution of detector devices.

real-time satellite imagery is not a commercial reality yet, but daily is.

Re: Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow

#72
Had the pleasure of working with their engineering team last year as part of a pro-bono data consulting grant that a nonprofit I work on (http://www.deltanalytics.org/) provides.

Excited to see how these systems are integrated into prevention / intervention and other applications for these systems beyond detecting illegal logging.

Re: Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow

#73

Have the creators of this project considered the privacy implications of capturing, recording, or analyzing audio from the rainforest? What happens if people are walking near a microphone and a conversation is picked up by the microphones? I realize that the audio is probably analyzed for the sound of chainsaws, and then thrown away, but there's still the potential that such a system could be misused. So just wonderi…

worth thinking about, of course - but the great outdoors is not a private place.

Re: Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow

#74

Have the creators of this project considered the privacy implications of capturing, recording, or analyzing audio from the rainforest? What happens if people are walking near a microphone and a conversation is picked up by the microphones? I realize that the audio is probably analyzed for the sound of chainsaws, and then thrown away, but there's still the potential that such a system could be misused. So just wonderi…

While reflecting on this--and ethical issues aside--it did occur to me that there's probably a lot more data you could collect from the audio gathered in the rainforest, i.e. what animals are active in what areas of the rainforest and what times, weather data such as intensity of rain or wind, volume of animal activity in a particular area of the rainforest, etc.

Re: Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow

#79
How about ultra-low power microprocessors coupled with capacitors, solar cells, and MEMS microphones, that can use a continual Fourier analysis to identify gunshots? The internal memory could be kept so small, as to preclude the possibility of recording someone's voice for longer than one phoneme. These could then be sprinkled around someplace like the gang territory parts of Oakland.

EDIT: Seems that another commenter is aware of a company doing something like this: http://www.shotspotter.com/company

Re: Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow

#80
Where do I begin if I want to set something like this up?

As an experiment - my neighborhood in India has a problem with loud motorbikes that are illegally modified. Hypothetically if I wanted to use this approach (there are probably simpler ones in this specific case), where do I start?

Do I just start recording gigabytes of audio data every day and start doing some kind of FFT on the data and manually tagging cases of loud bikes?

After that I suspect I can use one of those ML cheat sheets to figure out what is the best model for this kind of thing and then I just send it data via the TensorFlow library?

On the surface of it it feels like I'd be spending hours of processing time converting the audio data and hours of manual tagging before I get anywhere close to a solution. Is there a quicker or smarter way to go about this?

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