Definitions of acoustic indices

[KalmiaLatifolia]

«Definitions of acoustic indices»

Currently, it is very difficult to find what each of the acoustic index outputs are. The output CSVs use abbreviations for each acoustic index. While some of these are commonly known (e.g. ACI) others are more difficult to guess, or the method of calculating the index isn't clear.

Proposal:

It would be useful to have somewhere on the github, or included in the README, or in the documentation, a list of all of the abbreviations of all the indices, and how those indices are calculated.

Alternatives:

There are some unpublished reports and published papers by Towsey which give definitions of some of the AP indices which I have been using, but it is ambiguous whether the definitions in these papers are the same methods used in the current version of AP.exe, and not all of the current AP index outputs are included in these older reports.

Additional context

These are the existing documents I've found which contain some index definitions:
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/110634/
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/216373/
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2014.05.063

[KalmiaLatifolia]

I've been able to guess some but not all of the indices:

ACI = Acoustic Complexity Index
BGN = background noise
CVR = acoustic cover
DIF = ?
ENT = temporal entropy Ht
OSC = ?
RHZ = Ridges, horizontal
RNG = Ridges, negative slope
RPS = Ridges, positive slope
RVT = Ridges, vertical
SPT = spectral peak tracks
SUM = ?
PMN = Power Minus Noise

ZeroSignal
High Amplitude Index
Clipping Index
AvgSignalAmplitude
BackgroundNoise
Snr
AvgSnrOfActiveFrames
Activity
EventsPerSecond
SpectralCentriod
HighFreqCover
MidFreqCover
LowFreqCover
AcousticComplexity
TemporalEntropy
EntropyOfAverageSpectrum
EntropyofVarianceSpectrum
EntropyOfPeaksSpectrum
EntropyOfCoVSpectrum
ClusterCount
ThreeGramCount
Ndsi
SptDensity

[atruskie]

Hi @KalmiaLatifolia,

Those white papers should be considered authoritative.

You're right, we should have better documentation here, but this project is largely in maintenance mode, and we don't have anyone available to work on it.