A Concept Drift-Aware DAG-Based Classification Scheme for Acoustic Monitoring of Farms

Abstract

Intelligent farming as part of the green revolution is advancing the world of agriculture in such a way that farms become dynamic, with the overall scope being the optimization of animal production in an eco-friendly way. In this direction, this study proposes exploiting the acoustic modality for farm monitoring. Such information could be used in a stand-alone or complimentary mode to monitor the farm constantly at a great level of detail. To this end, the authors designed a scheme classifying the vocalizations produced by farm animals. More precisely, a directed acyclic graph was proposed, where each node carries out a binary classification task using hidden Markov models. The topological ordering follows a criterion derived from the Kullback-Leibler divergence. In addition, a transfer learning-based module for handling concept drifts was proposed. During the experimental phase, the authors employed a publicly available dataset including vocalizations of seven animals typically encountered in farms, where promising recognition rates were reported.