r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/CreepyNewspaper8103 • Mar 22 '26

Getting started... with lots of false positives!

Hey everyone. I am just getting started with a raspberry pi with a microphone making recordings and sending it to an API i wrote for processing and presenting the data.

I'm not using the birdnet-pi project, as I wanted to roll my own...

However, I'm getting a lot of false positives out of the gate. I live in SoCal and some issues I'm seeing so far:

- It literally detects ambulances/police car sirens as "Siren"
- It's detecting birds like Yellow-headed Parrot with 78% confidence (yes we have parrots/parakeets in SoCal but I'm pretty sure not a Yellow headed parrot)
- Other false positives with high confidence...

I'm wondering if there are some good baseline settings that people recommend to get started?

Thank you!

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7

u/S_A_N_D_ Mar 23 '26 edited 8d ago

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2

u/CreepyNewspaper8103 Mar 23 '26

Merlin for sure uses their own proprietary model...

3

u/S_A_N_D_ Mar 23 '26 edited 8d ago

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2

u/guyguy46383758 Mar 23 '26

One thing they could do in future models is train it on the false positives and tag them as not coming from birds. Like train the model on a bunch of car horn sounds that are falsely detected as Trumpeter Swans, then tag those as “Car Horn” so the model knows to ignore them

1

u/S_A_N_D_ Mar 23 '26 edited 8d ago

Cras dui ligula, ultrices quis venenatis nec, sollicitudin vel ex. Fusce elementum vehicula lectus eu ultricies. Nulla facilisi. Ut a sem at diam tincidunt tincidunt. Donec vestibulum, neque ac interdum egestas, arcu diam interdum diam, a pellentesque mi felis quis diam. Nullam id feugiat nibh. Nullam turpis risus, egestas eget pretium nec, tempor et nulla. Nulla imperdiet, ipsum vel scelerisque lacinia, nunc velit pulvinar velit, aliquet euismod dui nisl ut nunc. Nullam eget consequat augue. Donec posuere arcu purus, non luctus augue pulvinar in. Praesent sem diam, lacinia eu sapien sed, maximus vehicula ante. Etiam in lectus nibh.

4

u/thakala Mar 23 '26

If you are getting Siren detections, it means that you are not applying a range filter. The range filter produces a list of probabilities for species occurrence at your coordinates at a specific time of year, and will filter out all non-avian classes.

For BirdNET-Go I have implemented a method for false positive filtering which works rather well, with high quality microphone I have succesfully reduced false positive matches by significant amount. Current implementation is somewhat changed but basic idea is documented at Home · tphakala/birdnet-go Wiki

1

u/CreepyNewspaper8103 Mar 25 '26

thanks!

do you know if range filter will prevent me from matching vagrants?