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Marine Mammal Species Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks and a Novel Acoustic Representation

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Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11908))

Abstract

Research into automated systems for detecting and classifying marine mammals in acoustic recordings is expanding internationally due to the necessity to analyze large collections of data for conservation purposes. In this work, we present a Convolutional Neural Network that is capable of classifying the vocalizations of three species of whales, non-biological sources of noise, and a fifth class pertaining to ambient noise. In this way, the classifier is capable of detecting the presence and absence of whale vocalizations in an acoustic recording. Through transfer learning, we show that the classifier is capable of learning high-level representations and can generalize to additional species. We also propose a novel representation of acoustic signals that builds upon the commonly used spectrogram representation by way of interpolating and stacking multiple spectrograms produced using different Short-time Fourier Transform (STFT) parameters. The proposed representation is particularly effective for the task of marine mammal species classification where the acoustic events we are attempting to classify are sensitive to the parameters of the STFT.

Stan Matwin’s research is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and by the Canada Research Chairs program.

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Acknowledgements

Collaboration between researchers at JASCO Applied Sciences and Dalhousie University was made possible through a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Engage Grant. The acoustic recordings described in this paper were collected by JASCO Applied Sciences under a contribution agreement with the Environmental Studies Research Fund.

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Correspondence to Mark Thomas .

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Thomas, M., Martin, B., Kowarski, K., Gaudet, B., Matwin, S. (2020). Marine Mammal Species Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks and a Novel Acoustic Representation. In: Brefeld, U., Fromont, E., Hotho, A., Knobbe, A., Maathuis, M., Robardet, C. (eds) Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11908. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46133-1_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46133-1_18

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