Estimating the Number of Marine Mammals Using Recordings of Clicks from One Microphone ...

• Main Authors: Halkias, Xanadu C., Ellis, Daniel P. W.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Columbia University 2006
• Subjects: Electrical engineering; Marine Mammal Monitoring
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7916/d88342fq; https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D88342FQ

An important but challenging task is to extract information on the location and/or number of marine mammals present given recordings from an array of hydrophones. Systems such as the marine mammal monitoring on Navy Ranges (M3R) attempt to localize marine mammals as well as to get an estimate of their number using cross-correlation techniques on all available hydrophones. Our methodology offers the possibility to extract an estimate of the number of marine mammals given recordings from a single hydrophone, thus providing information to a researcher who does not have access to a larger array. The algorithm is based on three steps: detection of the clicks in the spectrogram using their energy, extraction of meaningful features, such as cepstral coefficients that are descriptive of the detected calls, and, lastly, choosing the appropriate number of clusters when using spectral clustering through the maximization of a given metric. The chosen number of clusters that best represents the data is an estimate of ...