Real time classification of sperm whale clicks and shipping impulses from fixed ocean observatories

Authors

  • Serge Alain Zaugg
  • Mike van der Schaar
  • Ludwig Houégnigan
  • Michel André

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5821/iwp.2009.8.15691

Abstract

The automated acoustic detection of cetaceans in real time is an important tool to study their behaviour and distribution and for activating mitigation measures in the context of harmful anthropogenic activities at sea. Acoustic data from the NEMO ONDE deep sea observatory (Sicily) indicated that sperm whale clicks were present in 15 % of the recordings and impulsive ship noise in 10 %. The ship noise poses a serious challenge to the detection of sperm whale clicks, since it is an important source of false positives. As part of an integrated classification system, we present a classification module aimed at the automated and real time classification of impulses from sperm whales and shipping. The achieved classification performance indicates that it reliably separates a large proportion of sperm whale clicks from shipping impulses.

Issue

No. 8 (2009)

Section

Articles

License

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya has joined the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. This declaration proposes the universal acces to the results of scientific and technical research.

All papers presented at Martech will be published in both the UPCommons and the Martech organization web sites, the former being the institutional digital deposit of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (https://upcommons.upc.edu). This difussion will be made through the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 or similar (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/deed.en).

When sending the final paper, the author must agree to the conference having non-exclusive rights on this operation. The author will maintain his/her right to diffuse the paper elsewhere.