CEB: A collection of strongly-labeled bird soundscapes and Xeno-Canto recordings from Central Europe, with bounding boxes and vocalization types

Overview This collection Central European Birds (CEB) contains 92,857 annotations across 20,826 audio files, covering 256 eBird species codes (266 scientific names) and 21 distinct vocalization types. It is organized into three subsets that differ in how the audio was recorded and how thoroughly it was annotated: train_xenocanto: focal recordings from Xeno-Canto for the project's target species (covering 57 of the 59 evaluation species), re-annotated with bounding boxes and vocalization types train_soundscape: point-based annotated PAM soundscape recordings, partially with vocalization type annotations test_soundscape: strongly-labeled PAM soundscapes for evaluation with vocalization type annotations All audio is provided as FLAC. Published file paths and coordinates are anonymized. This collection supports scientific research and benchmark development in avian bioacoustics. It enables the development and evaluation of models for species detection, vocalization-type classification, and sound-event localization across focal recordings and passive acoustic monitoring soundscapes Subsets train_xenocanto 2,210 audio files, 15,495 annotations, 186 species Focal recordings originating from Xeno-Canto. These were originally only weakly labeled. For this dataset they were downloaded and re-annotated: bounding boxes were drawn, labels were corrected, and vocalization types were assigned. Background species are also newly annotated. train_soundscape 18,469 audio files, 62,298 annotations, 216 species Weakly-labeled PAM soundscape recordings. Each annotation marks an event by its center point with a fixed ±2.5 s window around it (a 5 s span). Vocalization types are present for some annotations but not all (34k annotations have no vocalization type assigned). Some annotations are multi-label: when several species overlap, the species and label columns (scientific_name, common_name, ebird_code_multilabel, ebird#voc_type) list the values separated by "|" (5,070 annotations). test_soundscape 147 audio files, 15,064 annotations, 59 species Strongly-labeled soundscape recordings. Every sound event is annotated with a time-frequency bounding box (start/end time, low/high frequency) and a vocalization type. This subset is a meticulously annotated subset of the soundscape recordings and is intended as the evaluation set. Geographic Coverage Recordings are predominantly from Germany, with a small subset from Greece. Coordinates in the metadata are rounded to whole degrees to reduce spatial precision, so the locations in the metadata are approximate regions rather than exact sites. (Focal train_xenocanto recordings do not carry coordinates.) Vocalization Types Vocalization types are encoded in the ebird#voc_type column. The dataset uses 21 distinct types (e.g. song, contact call, flight call, drumming). The complete list of values with their per-subset counts is provided in the companion file voc_types.json. In the weakly-labeled train_soundscape subset many annotations have no vocalization type assigned. Files in this Collection *.csv contain the metadata for the subset. *.tar.gz contain the audio (.flac) files for the subsets. voc_types.json contains the vocalization-type values with their per-subset counts. scientific_name_counts.json contains the species (scientific_name) values with their per-subset counts. schema.json contains the data dictionary for the CSV columns. Within each audio archive, files use anonymized paths of the form <subset>_project_<NNN>/audio_<NNNNNN>.flace.g. train_soundscape_project_001/audio_000001.flac Licenses This record bundles material under more than one license, choose terms by component. Soundscape audio (train_soundscape and test_soundscape) and ALL dataset metadata and annotations are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0). This is the dataset's own contribution and the record-level license. Focal audio (train_xenocanto) was collected from Xeno-Canto. Each recording is redistributed under its own original license, given per row in the license column, with attribution to the recordist (xc_recordist) and the source (xc_url). It is not relicensed. Several recordings are non-commercial (NC) and/or share-alike (SA), so use of the focal audio is subject to those per-recording terms. License breakdown for the 15,495 train_xenocanto annotations: CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0: 14,299 CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0: 870 CC-BY 4.0: 131 CC-BY-SA 4.0: 73 CC0 1.0: 58 CC-BY-NC 4.0: 10 Acknowledgements This work was carried out as part of the DeepBirdDetect project (Fkz. 67KI31040E) funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV). All annotation and validation was done by Ralph Martin. Disclaimer We carefully selected and composed this dataset's content. If you believe that any of this content violates licensing agreements or infringes on intellectual property rights, please contact us immediately. In such a case, we will promptly investigate the issue and remove the implicated data records from our dataset if necessary. Users are responsible for ensuring that their use of the dataset complies with all licenses, applicable laws, regulations, and ethical guidelines. We make no representations or warranties of any kind and accept no responsibility in the case of violations.