National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
United States Department of Commerce


 

FY 2007

MobySound: A reference archive for studying automatic recognition of marine mammal sounds

Mellinger, D.K., and C.W. Clark

Appl. Acoust., 67(11–12), 1226–1242, doi: 10.1016/j.apacoust.2006.06.002 (2006)


A reference archive has been constructed to facilitate research on automatic recognition of marine mammal sounds. The archive enables researchers to have access to recorded sounds from a variety of marine species, sounds that can be very difficult to obtain in the field. The archive also lets researchers use different sound-recognition methods on a common set of sounds, making it possible to compare directly the effectiveness of the different methods. In recognizing sounds in a given recording, the type and frequency of noise present has a strong effect on the difficulty of the recognition problem; a measure of the amount of interference was devised, the "time-local, in-band, signal-to-noise ratio", and was applied to each sound in the archive. Current entries in the archive comprise low-frequency sounds of large whales, and have about 14,000 vocalizations from eight species of baleen whales. MobySound may be accessed at http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/projects/MobySound/. Contributions to the archive are welcomed.



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