Deep noise reduction enables in-situ acoustic bird monitoring from noisy drone recordings

L. Wang, M. Clayton, and A. Rossberg, "In-situ aerial bioacoustic monitoring from extremely noisy drone recordings," Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2026, in press.



Demos


Simulated recording:

Spectrogram examples illustrating how the General model restores bird calls masked by drone noise. From left to right: simulated mixtures at -5, -15, and -25 dB input SNR. From top to bottom: the original clean bird call (Eurasian Blue Tit), the noisy mixture, and the enhanced output.
Corresponding audio samples:

Original
Input SNR (SDR): -5 dB Input SNR (SDR): -15dB Input SNR (SDR): -25dB
Output SDR: 16.4dB Output SDR: 11.8dB Output SDR: 3.7dB


In-situ recording:

Scenario 1: Aerial recording at altitude 30 m

Noisy input
Enhanced

Scenario 2: Simultaneous ground recording with drone hovering at altitude 30 m

Noisy input
Enhanced