Sound-based Bee Colony State Analysis Using Compact MFCC Patterns

Bees play an important role in agricultural production. However, beekeeping relies on experienced beekeepers to take time and effort to maintain the bee colonies. To lower the threshold of beekeeping and improve efficiency, we proposed a sound-based bee colony state analysis model using compact Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) patterns. Facing high-dimensional bee colony sound signals, we obtained MFCCs from the signals and constructed a set of filters to extract MFCC-based compact features called compact MFCC patterns. After extracting compact features, the feature set was given to the support vector machine classifier. We recorded the sounds of bee colonies under normal conditions and in the absence of the queen bee to verify the proposed model. While significantly compressing the dimensionality of MFCCs, the model still achieved an accuracy score of 99.30% in distinguishing the presence of the queen bee. The extracted compact MFCC patterns effectively and compactly characterize the information related to the bee colony states in the bee colony sound signals, giving the model an excellent ability to discriminate the state of the bee colony.