A dataset of insect sounds from 459 species for bioacoustic machine learning

Automatic recognition of insect sound could help us understand changing biodiversity trends around the world-but insect sounds are challenging to recognize even for deep learning, due to the broad frequency ranges and limited amount of training data. We present a new dataset comprised of 26298 audio files (226.6 hours), from 459 species of Orthoptera (310 species) and Cicadidae (149 species). InsectSet459 is the first large-scale dataset of insect sound that is easily applicable for developing novel deep-learning methods. Its recordings were made with a variety of audio recorders using varying sample rates to capture the extremely broad range of frequencies that insects produce. We benchmark performance with two state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers, demonstrating good performance but also significant room for improvement in acoustic insect classification. This dataset can serve as a realistic test case for implementing insect monitoring workflows, and as a challenging basis for the development of audio representation methods that can handle highly variable frequencies and/or sample rates.