Projects:2019s2-22702 Barkbusters 2.0

The aim of the project is to develop a small deployable device which can automatically record, identify a dog barking from an individual dog and generate a log with the date and time tag. This device is developed to give evidence to the dog and cat management office.

Introduction

Project description

Bark busters 2.0 is designed not to control the barking of the dog but to log the barking activity of a specific animal. This can be used as proof by the person who is facing a nuisance due to a specific animal and make a complaint to the concerned officer. This is a simple solution to collect proof against a disturbing animal. When dealing with dogs, there are legal issues that need to be considered. Legally, the person owning the dog is solely responsible for the control of the dog is guilty of an offence if a dog” creates a noise, by barking or otherwise, which persistently occurs or continues to such a degree or extent that unreasonably interferes with the peace or convenience of a person.” Bark busters 2.0 helps the person facing inconvenience with a specific animal to collect proof against it and complaint to the concerned officer. We will have to design the device in such a way that it should be able to differentiate the noises and able to record only the log activity of a specific animal. It should also be able to differentiate the bark of one animal to another.

Project team

Project students

• Mingde Jiang
• Nityasri Gallennagari

Supervisors

• Prof. Langford White
• Dr. Brian Ng

Objectives

This project aims to develop a small field deployable device.

Background

According to the data from the Brisbane City Council (BCC), barking dogs, crowing roosters and screeching cats top the list when it comes to complaints to the council for noise, with 7,245 complaints in 2016/17 [1]. This news indicated that the noise of animals from the field or even from their neighbours are annoying residents. According to the South Australian Dog and Cat Management Act 1995, a person who owns or is responsible for the control of a dog is guilty of an offence if the dog (either alone or together with other dogs, whether or not in the same ownership) creates a noise, by barking or otherwise, which persistently occurs or continues to such a degree or extent that it unreasonably interferes with the peace, comfort or convenience of a person [2]. People who are suffering from the noise emitted by the dogs are allowed to make a complaint to the city council. To do that, the city council will provide a dog barking pack which include a 7 day diary to complaints. Complaints have to complete the diary with the dog barking activity record to prove that they are really troubled by dog barks. However, self-completed records by the complaints are inaccurate and may not be fair. That’s why a device is needed with capabilities of recognizing and recording in this case.

The standard program of the Campbelltown City Council [3] dealing with complaints about the dog barks is to provide a Barking Dog pack which includes a diary for complainants to record the barking activity. The following action is once there is sufficient evidence in the diary, the council will contact the dog owner to rectifier the situation and perform a 14 days monitor. If the circumstances have not improved, the council will review information collected from nearby residents to determine whether a further action will be performed. If it can be established that the noise is persistent and is an unreasonable interference, the council will take action, however, civil action by those effected is also possible.

However, the only solution currently available to the disturbed residents is to buy a recorder with enough storage space and power [4]. They are suggested to turn the recorder on and leave it in the yard under a shelter cover. “Just leave it under cover outside recording for whatever periods you want and download the audio files from it. Don't do more than a few hours at a time or it's just too big a file to easily deal with.”, said by Zambuck, a replier to this complaint [5].

This method has two main problems. The first one is that the recorder is way too expensive to be used only for complaint proof collecting. People maybe not willing to pay that much for others fault. The second defect is a recorder cannot identify whether the barking belongs to an individual dog. This gives the dog owner opportunity to argue that the barking recorded is not from his or her dog.

The device we developed simplifies the complex process by providing a device which can automatically record, identify a dog barking from an individual dog and generate a log with time tag instead of investigating by the council. People who are annoyed by the dog bark can offer an evidence of noise by simply place the device near the barking source. Also, the evidence recorded by the device is more accurate and convincing than the complainer's manual record. This is the significance of this project.

Method

This section introduced the background theory and hardware implementation.

Background theory

Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs)

MFCC is one of the methods for extracting speech feature parameters. Because of its unique cepstrum-based extraction method, it is more in line with human auditory principles, and thus is the most common and effective speech feature extraction algorithm. The MFCC is a cepstral coefficient extracted from the Mel scale frequency domain. Since humans have a very accurate sense of sound, they can distinguish between different sound sources by their timbre.

The Mel scale exactly describes the nonlinear characteristics of the human ear's perception of frequency to simulate the human's accurate discrimination of timbre [6].

Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)

A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is a parametric probability density function represented as a weighted sum of Gaussian component densities. GMMs are commonly used as a parametric model of the probability distribution of continuous measurements or features in a biometric system, such as vocal tract related spectral features in a speaker recognition system. GMM parameters are estimated from training data using the iterative Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm or Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation from a well-trained prior model. [7]

References

[1] “Barking dogs, crowing roosters and screeching cats top noise complaints list in Brisbane” (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-19/most-common-noise-complaints-brisbane-and-what-to-do-about-it/9059182)

[2] Dog and Cat Management Act 1995, 45A (5).

[3] “Barking Dog Information Pack” (https://www.campbelltown.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/236961/Barking-Dog-Information-Pack.pdf)

[4] "2GB Digital Voice Recorder" (https://www.jaycar.com.au/2gb-digital-voice-recorder/p/XC0387)

[5] Online post: “Any Good Android Recorders to Prove a Barking Dog?” (https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/373772)

[6] “Speech Processing for Machine Learning: Filter banks, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and What's In-Between” (https://haythamfayek.com/2016/04/21/speech-processing-for-machine-learning.html)

[7] L. Baum er al., A maximization technique occurring in the statistical analysis of probabilistic functions of Markov chains, Ann. Math Srar., vol. 41, pp. 164-171, 1970.

[8]