Detection and classification of marine mammal sounds

Ocean is home to a large population of marine mammals such as dolphins and whales and concerns over anthropogenic activities in the regions close to their habitants have been
increased. Therefore the ability to detect the presence of these species in the field, to
analyze and classify their vocalization patterns for signs of distress and distortion of their
communication calls will prove to be invaluable in protecting these species. The objective of this research is to investigate methods that automatically detect and classify vocalization patterns of marine mammals. The first work performed is the classification of bottlenose dolphin calls by type. The extraction of salient and distinguishing features from recordings is a major part of this endeavor. To this end, two strategies are evaluated with real datasets provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: The first strategy is to use contour-based features such as Time-Frequency Parameters and Fourier Descriptors and the second is to employ texture-based features such as Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Gabor Wavelets. Once dolphin whistle features
are extracted for spectrograms, selection of classification procedures is crucial to the success of the process. For this purpose, the performances of classifiers such as K-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, and Sparse Representation Classifier (SRC) are assessed thoroughly, together with those of the underlined feature extractors.