Microsoft MegaDetector-Acoustic¶
Open-source bioacoustic AI for audio-based wildlife detection and classification.
MegaDetector-Acoustic is a toolkit from the Microsoft AI for Good Lab for training, evaluating, and deploying deep learning models on passive acoustic monitoring recordings. It is powered by the PyTorch-Wildlife framework and is part of the microsoft/Biodiversity ecosystem.
What It Does¶
MegaDetector-Acoustic turns raw audio recordings into structured species predictions:
- Dataset preparation — generates sliding windows and GPU-accelerated mel spectrograms from raw
.wav/.flacfiles - Training — binary or multiclass classification using ResNet backbones with spectrogram augmentation (SpecAugment, MixUp)
- Inference — sliding-window predictions on long recordings, exported as CSV with per-window probabilities
Get Started¶
See the Installation page, then run the demo notebook:
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Acoustic
cd MegaDetector-Acoustic
pip install -r requirements.txt
jupyter notebook demo/bioacoustics_demo.ipynb
The demo walks through the full pipeline using real bird recordings from the PteroSet dataset.
Part of the Biodiversity Ecosystem¶
MegaDetector-Acoustic is one model in a larger open-source ecosystem from the Microsoft AI for Good Lab.
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| microsoft/Biodiversity | Umbrella hub — PyTorch-Wildlife, MegaDetector, ecosystem overview |
| microsoft/MegaDetector | Animal, human, and vehicle detection for camera-trap images |
| microsoft/PytorchWildlife | The collaborative deep learning framework for wildlife monitoring |
| microsoft/MegaDetector-Acoustic | This repo — bioacoustic AI for audio-based wildlife monitoring |
| microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead | Wildlife detection in aerial and drone imagery |
| microsoft/MegaDetector-Sonar | Sonar-based wildlife detection for aquatic monitoring |
| microsoft/MegaDetector-Classifier | Camera-trap species classification fine-tuning — adapt classifiers to your own datasets and geographic regions |
| microsoft/SPARROW | Solar-Powered Acoustic and Remote Recording Observation Watch — AI-enabled edge device |
| SPARROW Studio | Desktop application for all AI for Good Lab models |