English

Detection of blue whale vocalisations using a temporal-domain convolutional neural network

Audio and Speech Processing 2021-10-06 v1 Sound

Abstract

We present a framework for detecting blue whale vocalisations from acoustic submarine recordings. The proposed methodology comprises three stages: i) a preprocessing step where the audio recordings are conditioned through normalisation, filtering, and denoising; ii) a label-propagation mechanism to ensure the consistency of the annotations of the whale vocalisations, and iii) a convolutional neural network that receives audio samples. Based on 34 real-world submarine recordings (28 for training and 6 for testing) we obtained promising performance indicators including an Accuracy of 85.4\% and a Recall of 93.5\%. Furthermore, even for the cases where our detector did not match the ground-truth labels, a visual inspection validates the ability of our approach to detect possible parts of whale calls unlabelled as such due to not being complete calls.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.02151,
  title  = {Detection of blue whale vocalisations using a temporal-domain convolutional neural network},
  author = {Bryan Sagredo and Sonia Español-Jiménez and Felipe Tobar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.02151},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:38:28.324Z