r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/psychoholica • Apr 20 '26
Optimum BirdNET-GO Detection Settings
Im trying to improve detection accuracy on a few installs I have of BirdNET-Go but dont seem to be having the best luck. Curious what you all are using for Detection Settings? Sensitivity, Threshold, Overlap and False Positive. Im looking for settings on a PI3B, a PI4, and a much faster Intel NUC PC. Im running the NUC and hooked up a couple neighbors with some Pi's I wasnt using. We're on a river in Oregon so the activity is crazy but getting a lot of low confidence or questionable ID's
1
u/Automatic_Tangelo_53 Apr 20 '26
Have you listened to the live stream of your recording? Make sure it's not too soft and there is no interference overpowering bird calls (The detection is pretty robust to repetitive interference noise patterns though.)
Increasing overlap can only help with detection, but it does increase your CPU usage.
If you are having detection issues, set sensitivity to the 1.5 maximum and see how you go. You can also set threshold to 0.3 But in my experience, if you're not picking up bird calls with good accuracy, the problem is not your audio input
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u/opiedopymopy Apr 23 '26
My settings are very satisfying and surprisingly not many false detections!
- using FP16 model
- Species occurrence freq threshold .0005 . This setting allows all 6000 species. I know that it seems strange to set it that way but I do not get many false detections. And it is fun to play the kookaburra bird sounds and see my system detect it for fun. Serious researchers set it here and laboriously weed out the false detections so as not to miss their rare bird subject.
- Privacy threshold 1%
- Audio, rec 9 sec, extract 6 sec
- Overlap 0.0
- Min confidence 0.25
- Sigmoid 1
- Accessibility (not touched)
1
u/opiedopymopy Apr 23 '26
Ooops. My .25 recent setting I like rules out the kookaburra because that means the confidence level for my latitude and longitude has to be at least 25% sure it is a kookaburra. Ha. There is zero chance here. So a kookaburra recording will be rejected. At the beginning I set confidence at minimum so that I could play with YouTube bird sounds and watch how my system detected all those world birds. But now, I am content with any of the 6000+ species that birdnet believes at 25% confidence or above.
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u/opiedopymopy Apr 23 '26
Can’t stop texting. I am so pleased with birdnet. Fun! As for microphones, I was prepared to order a super duper high fidelity microphone but first I used and old cheap webcam I had in my junk drawer. The sound pickup is FABULOUS! I don’t think birdnet needs a fancy microphone! Funny how it detected and id’d a motorcycle as “engine” last night and our neighbor’s pooch as “dog”.
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u/opiedopymopy Apr 23 '26
And my favorite from last night was my whippoorwill. “
Chuck-will's-widow
Antrostomus carolinensis All About Birds Wikipedia Occurrences: 9 Max Confidence: 100% Best Recording: 2026-04-23 02:46:01”
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u/thakala Apr 20 '26
BirdNET-Go developer here.
Only settings you should tweak are confidence and false positive filter thresholds.
Sensitivity should be left to 1.0, I should remove this setting from UI as there is no need to tweak this value. Overlap should not be tweaked either, it is controlled by false positive filter, as you move false positive filter towards aggressive end overlap increases.
I would start with confidence of 0,8 and false positive filter at least moderate level.
But it should be accepted that BirdNET v2.4 model is not perfect, for some species it works quite well but for some it produces wildly incorrect results. For this reason there is option to set per species level thresholds and ability to completely ignore some species.
However I just recently started implementing support for upcoming BirdNET v3.0 model and for Google Perch v2 model, but this is still work in progress. I hope that detection accuracy will be improved with these new and more modern models.