TITLE:

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK: AUTOMATING THE DETECTION OF DOLPHIN WHISTLES IN COMPLEX AUDITORY SCENES

DATE:

Friday, Sep 23th, 2011

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Marie Roch
Department of Computer Science.
San Diego State University.

ABSTRACT:

Toothed whales and dolphins produce a variety of sounds for navigation and communication. This talk will focus on algorithms and tools that we have developed for the annotation of whistles, social calls that are frequency modulated tonals. Our Silbido algorithm is the first published algorithm to demonstrate the capability to provide annotation of complex auditory scenes, where many animals may be whistling simultaneously and to evaluate performance on a large data set of approximately one hour of calls spanning multiple species in multiple locations.

As part of an effort to promote research in this area, the annotation and scoring tools, data and human analyst generated annotations that were used to evaluate the performance of our algorithm have been donated to the bioacoustics community. They were used as a common data set in a recent conference on passive acoustic monitoring of cetaceans and will appear in the MobySound marine mammal audio data archive.

We conclude the talk with the introduction of preliminary work on a classification system to associate whistles with species. While echolocation clicks have been the focus of our recent work, whistles can provide an additional source of information, and the system has the potential to be extended to determine if there are associations between whistle types and behavioral states.

HOST:

Dr. Jose Castillo.

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