Temporal separation of whale vocalizations from background oceanic noise using a power calculation

• Main Authors: van Wyk, Jacques, Versfeld, Jaco, Preez, Johan du
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2021
• Subjects: Sound cs.SD; Audio and Speech Processing eess.AS; FOS Computer and information sciences; FOS Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Southern Right Whale
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2110.10010; https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10010

The process of analyzing audio signals in search of cetacean vocalizations is in many cases a very arduous task, requiring many complex computations, a plethora of digital processing techniques and the scrutinization of an audio signal with a fine comb to determine where the vocalizations are located. To ease this process, a computationally efficient and noise-resistant method for determining whether an audio segment contains a potential cetacean call is developed here with the help of a robust power calculation for stationary Gaussian noise signals and a recursive method for determining the mean and variance of a given sample frame. The resulting detector is tested on audio recordings containing southern right whale sounds and its performance is compared to a contemporary energy detector and a popular deep learning method. The detector exhibits good performance at moderate-to-high signal-to-noise ratio values. The detector succeeds in being easy to implement, computationally efficient to use and robust enough to accurately detect whale vocalizations in a noisy underwater environment.