Many odontocetes produce frequency modulated tonal calls known as whistles. The ability to automatically determine time × frequency tracks corresponding to these vocalizations has numerous applications including species description, identification, and density estimation. This work develops and compares two algorithms on a common corpus of nearly one hour of data collected in the Southern California Bight and at Palmyra Atoll. The corpus contains over 3000 whistles from bottlenose dolphins, long- and short-beaked common dolphins, spinner dolphins, and melon-headed whales that have been annotated by a human, and released to the Moby Sound archive. Both algorithms use a common signal processing front end to determine time × frequency peaks from a spectrogram. In the first method, a particle filter performs Bayesian filtering, estimating the contour from the noisy spectral peaks. The second method uses an adaptive polynomial prediction to connect peaks into a graph, merging graphs when they cross. Whistle contours are extracted from graphs using information from both sides of crossings. The particle filter was able to retrieve 71.5% (recall) of the human annotated tonals with 60.8% of the detections being valid (precision). The graph algorithm’s recall rate was 80.0% with a precision of 76.9%.
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October 2011
October 03 2011
Automated extraction of odontocete whistle contours
Marie A. Roch;
Marie A. Roch
a)
San Diego State University
, Department of Computer Science, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, California 92182-7720
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T. Scott Brandes;
T. Scott Brandes
Signal Innovations Group, Incorporated, 4721 Emperor Boulevard, Suite 330, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27703
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Bhavesh Patel;
Bhavesh Patel
San Diego State University
, Department of Computer Science, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, California 92182-7720
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Yvonne Barkley;
Yvonne Barkley
Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
, 3333 North Torrey Pines Court, La Jolla, California 92037
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Simone Baumann-Pickering;
Simone Baumann-Pickering
Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
University of California
, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0205
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Melissa S. Soldevilla
Melissa S. Soldevilla
Duke University Marine Laboratory
, 135 Duke Marine Lab Road, Beaufort, North Carolina 28516
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a)
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Electronic mail: marie.roch@sdsu.edu
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, 2212–2223 (2011)
Article history
Received:
March 07 2011
Accepted:
July 25 2011
Citation
Marie A. Roch, T. Scott Brandes, Bhavesh Patel, Yvonne Barkley, Simone Baumann-Pickering, Melissa S. Soldevilla; Automated extraction of odontocete whistle contours. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 October 2011; 130 (4): 2212–2223. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3624821
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