Aggregation Strategies for Efficient Annotation of Bioacoustic Sound Events Using Active Learning
Richard Lindholm, Oscar Marklund, Olof Mogren, John Martinsson · 2025
The vast amounts of audio data collected in Sound Event Detection (SED) applications require efficient annotation strategies to enable supervised learning. Manual labeling is expensive and time-consuming, making Active Learning (AL) a promising approach for reducing annotation effort. We introduce Top K Entropy, a novel uncertainty aggregation strategy for AL that prioritizes the most uncertain segments within an audio recording, instead of averaging uncertainty across all segments. This approach enables the selection of entire recordings for annotation, improving efficiency in sparse data scenarios. We compare Top K Entropy to random sampling and Mean Entropy, and show that it achieves the same model performance using fewer labels, particularly in datasets with sparse sound events. Evaluations are performed on audio mixtures containing recordings from parks, featuring sound events such as meerkats, dogs, and baby cries, to reflect real-world bioacoustic monitoring scenarios. Using Top K Entropy for active learning, we can achieve comparable performance to training on the fully labeled dataset with only 8% of the labels. Top K Entropy outperforms Mean Entropy, suggesting that it is best to let the most uncertain segments represent the uncertainty of an audio file. The findings highlight the potential of AL for scalable annotation in audio and time-series applications, including bioacoustics.