batdetect2/docs/source/explanation/pipeline-overview.md

Pipeline overview

batdetect2 processes recordings as a sequence of modules. Each stage has a clear role and configuration surface.

End-to-end flow

1. Audio loading
2. Preprocessing (waveform -> spectrogram)
3. Detector forward pass
4. Postprocessing (peaks, decoding, thresholds)
5. Output formatting and export

Why the modular design matters

The model, preprocessing, postprocessing, targets, and output formatting are configured separately. That makes it easier to:

• swap components without rewriting the whole pipeline,
• keep experiments reproducible,
• adapt workflows to new datasets.

Core objects in the stack

• BatDetect2API orchestrates training, inference, and evaluation workflows.
• ModelConfig defines architecture, preprocessing, postprocessing, and targets.
• Targets controls event filtering, class encoding/decoding, and ROI mapping.

Related pages

• Preprocessing rationale: {doc}preprocessing-consistency
• Postprocessing rationale: {doc}postprocessing-and-thresholds
• Target rationale: {doc}target-encoding-and-decoding