A comparison of methods for detecting right whale calls,”

• Main Author: David K Mellinger
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: Pacific; Eubalaena glacialis; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1047.3474; http://www.ee.columbia.edu/%7Exanadu/papers/Mellinger04.pdf

ABSTRACT North Atlantic, North Pacific, and southern right whales all produce the up call, a frequency-modulated upsweep in the 50-200 Hz range. This call is one of the most common sounds, and frequently the most common sound, received from right whales, and as such is a useful indicator of the presence of right whales for acoustic surveys. A data set was prepared of 1857 calls and 6359 non-call sounds recorded from North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) near Georgia and Massachusetts. Two methods for the detection of the calls were compared: spectrogram correlation and a neural network. Spectrogram correlation parameters were chosen two ways, by manual choice using a sample of 20 calls, and by an optimization procedure that used all available calls. Neural network weights were trained via backpropagation on 9/10 of the test data set. Performance was measured separately for calls of different signal-to-noise ratio, as SNR heavily influences the performance of any detector. Results showed that the neural network performed best at this task, achieving an error rate of less than 6%, and is thus the preferred detection method here. Spectrogram correlation may be useful in situations in which a large set of training data is not available, as manual training on a small set of examples achieved an error rate (26%) that may be acceptable for many applications. SOMMAIRE Les baleines franches de l'Atlantique Nord, du Pacific Nord et Sud produisent toutes une vocalisation montante, soit un balayage ascendant modulé en fréquence dans la région de 50 à 200 Hz. Cette vocalisation est un des sons les plus communs produit par les baleines franches et, par le fait même, est un indicateur très utile de la présence des baleines lors de sondages acoustiques. Un ensemble de données a été préparé avec 1857 vocalisations et 6359 sons non vocalisés enregistrés auprès de baleines franches de l'Atlantique Nord (Eubalaena glacialis) près de la Georgie et du Massachusetts. Deux méthodes de détection des vocalisations ont été ...