Software for viewing and checking automatic detections.

TL;DR: A system is described for checking errors of automatic detection of animal vocalizations, which allows for rapid checking of detected sounds and calculation of the false‐positive (wrong‐detection) error rate.

Abstract: Automatic detection of animal vocalizations is now used widely for handling long‐duration recording. Automatic detection methods inevitably make some errors—both false positive (wrong detection) and false negative (missed call) errors. Here a system is described for checking these errors. The MATLAB system “Osprey” allows viewing spectrograms, manipulating their parameters, and making various measurements of the displayed sounds. Another program, “checkDetections”, takes a log file that was output by an automatic detection software and systematically displays the detected sound in Osprey, allows a user to indicate whether the detection is correct, and then skips to the next detection in the log. This allows for rapid checking of detected sounds and calculation of the false‐positive (wrong‐detection) error rate. A second system, “checkMissedCalls”, displays random segments of sound in which no calls were found and allows the user to check whether there really were calls. This allows the user to estimate th...