Releases | Open Sustainable Technology

birdnet - v1.0.0

The first stable release of birdnet. The API is now considered production-ready (Development Status :: 5), and this release brings the V3.0 model generation, four inference backends, per-file streaming results, and a long list of reliability fixes to the multiprocessing pipeline.

Features

BirdNET V3.0 (preview) acoustic model in four backends — tf, pb, pt and onnx — all supporting predict(..) and encode(..). Load with birdnet.load("acoustic", "3.0", <backend>); pt/onnx need the new birdnet[pt]/birdnet[onnx] extras. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/41
BirdNET-Geomodel V3.0 (v3.0.4 — 14,082 classes covering birds, insects, amphibians and mammals) in tf, pb, pt and onnx. The pt backend applies the sigmoid the TorchScript export omits, so all four backends return identical probabilities. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/41, https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/60 and https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/81
on_file_complete callback for acoustic predict(..)/encode(..) and their session variants, fired the moment each file is done with a single-file result — enabling streaming per-file persistence and live output. Runs off the inference hot path, so throughput is unaffected. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/57
apply_softmax option for acoustic predict(..), mirroring apply_sigmoid: scores become a softmax over the model logits, useful for confidence scores (e.g. Perch V2). by @max-mauermann in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/54
Partial Python 3.14 support. TensorFlow has no 3.14 wheels yet, so birdnet installs without it there and runs the TF-free backends — acoustic 3.0 and geo 3.0 via onnx/pt. TensorFlow-only paths raise a clear error instead of an ImportError. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/59

Changed

The pipeline now uses the spawn start method by default on all platforms, instead of inheriting Linux's fork, which could deadlock workers after TensorFlow started its multi-threaded runtime. A globally fixed start method is honored, and BIRDNET_START_METHOD overrides both, so fork/forkserver stay available by explicit opt-in. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/63
The V3.0 models share the geomodel's versioned taxonomy, which resolves every geo label and matches the acoustic label file more closely than the previous pin. ⚠️ Estonian (et) was dropped from the V3.0 language list, as the new taxonomy has no Estonian column. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/41 and https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/81
The progress callback runs on a background thread with a copy of the caller's context (contextvars), matching on_file_complete. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/53

Bugfixes

Most of these remove ways the inference pipeline could hang or return quietly wrong data.

Corrupt rows in prediction/encoding output caused by growing the internal result buffer with numpy.ndarray.resize, plus an off-by-one in the initial segment count. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/50
A ~1 s barrier on every run_arrays(..) call — on a warm session a 3 s clip went from 1069 ms to 39 ms. Also fixed an assertion that aborted a run when the ring-buffer scan found no readable slot. by @winedarksea in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/66
Producers and the performance tracker no longer attach the ring buffers inside a fork child, where SharedMemory(create=False) could block forever on a lock CPython does not reinitialize after fork. by @winedarksea in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/67
A pipeline process that dies mid-run — typically an OOM kill — is now reported with its name and exit code instead of leaving the call hanging forever. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/72
The progress callback's closing update, which reported zero processed segments for runs that had processed everything, and published nothing at all for a run without predictions — leaving the call waiting indefinitely. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/78
Sessions now tear down cleanly when cancelled, instead of blocking while draining worker queues. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/62
Model, label and taxonomy downloads retry transient network faults with a growing back-off instead of failing the first load(); permanent client errors still fail immediately. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/71
Geo V3.0 caches self-heal across releases. A cached SavedModel or label file from an older release was not detected as stale, so a version bump could keep serving outdated labels; label files now record the taxonomy they came from and regenerate when it changes. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/41 and https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/81

Known limitation

A worker killed by the OS while processing a batch still deadlocks the surviving workers on Linux and macOS — the killed process never releases the ring-buffer lock. Lowering n_workers or batch_size reduces the risk. Tracked in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/issues/73.

Under the hood

Documented the prediction worker limits and cleanup behaviour. by @Stava-Java in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/65
Additional test coverage, model caching between test runs, and CI stabilisation across macOS Intel, Windows and the fork lanes. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/58, https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/61, https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/63, https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/70, https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/79 and https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/80
Docs updates for BirdNET 3.0 and the n_workers memory limitation. by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/52 and https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/76

New Contributors

@max-mauermann made their first contribution in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/54
@Stava-Java made their first contribution in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/65
@winedarksea made their first contribution in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/66

Full Changelog: https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/compare/v0.2.16...v1.0.0

Biosphere - Avian Monitoring and Analysis - Python
Published by Josef-Haupt 16 days ago

birdnet - v0.2.16

What's Changed

Dev by @stefantaubert in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/44
Dev by @stefantaubert in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/45
Dev by @stefantaubert in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/46

Full Changelog: https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/compare/v0.2.15...v0.2.16

Biosphere - Avian Monitoring and Analysis - Python
Published by stefantaubert 4 months ago

birdnet - v0.2.15

What's Changed

Dev by @stefantaubert in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/36

Full Changelog: https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/compare/v0.2.14...v0.2.15

Biosphere - Avian Monitoring and Analysis - Python
Published by stefantaubert 4 months ago

birdnet - v0.2.14

What's Changed

fixes issue 29 by @stefantaubert in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/30
Updated sigmoid function call by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/26
Allow classifiers trained with hidden units and with append mode by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/33

Full Changelog: https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/compare/v0.2.13...v0.2.14

Biosphere - Avian Monitoring and Analysis - Python
Published by stefantaubert 4 months ago

birdnet - v0.2.13

What's Changed

Merge dev by @stefantaubert in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/31

Full Changelog: https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/compare/v0.2.12...v0.2.13

Biosphere - Avian Monitoring and Analysis - Python
Published by stefantaubert 5 months ago

birdnet - v0.2.12

What's Changed

Add to_structured_array to AcousticEncodingResultBase by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/24
Updated flat sigmoid to match birdnet_analyzer by @Josef-Haupt in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/25

New Contributors

@Josef-Haupt made their first contribution in https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/pull/24

Full Changelog: https://github.com/birdnet-team/birdnet/compare/v0.2.11...v0.2.12

Biosphere - Avian Monitoring and Analysis - Python
Published by stefantaubert 6 months ago