Peter Dugan

Peter Dugan, Melania Guerra, Dimitri Ponirakis et al.

This work presents a new toolkit for describing the acoustic properties of the ocean environment before, during and after a sound event caused by an underwater seismic air-gun. The toolkit uses existing sound measures, but uniquely applies these to capture the early time period (actual pulse) and late time period (reverberation and multiple arrivals). In total, 183 features are produced for each air-gun sound. This toolkit was utilized on data retrieved from a field deployment encompassing five marine autonomous recording units during a 46-day seismic air-gun survey in Baffin Bay, Greenland. Using this toolkit, a total of 147 million data points were identified from the Greenland deployment recordings. The feasibility of extracting a large number of features was then evaluated using two separate methods: a serial computer and a high performance system. Results indicate that data extraction performance took an estimated 216 hours for the serial system, and 18 hours for the high performance computer. This paper provides an analytical description of the new toolkit along with details for using it to identify relevant data.

Mohammad Pourhomayoun, Peter Dugan, Marian Popescu et al.

In this paper, we develop a novel method based on machine-learning and image processing to identify North Atlantic right whale (NARW) up-calls in the presence of high levels of ambient and interfering noise. We apply a continuous region algorithm on the spectrogram to extract the regions of interest, and then use grid masking techniques to generate a small feature set that is then used in an artificial neural network classifier to identify the NARW up-calls. It is shown that the proposed technique is effective in detecting and capturing even very faint up-calls, in the presence of ambient and interfering noises. The method is evaluated on a dataset recorded in Massachusetts Bay, United States. The dataset includes 20000 sound clips for training, and 10000 sound clips for testing. The results show that the proposed technique can achieve an error rate of less than FPR = 4.5% for a 90% true positive rate.

Mohammad Pourhomayoun, Peter Dugan, Marian Popescu et al.

In this paper, we propose a method to improve sound classification performance by combining signal features, derived from the time-frequency spectrogram, with human perception. The method presented herein exploits an artificial neural network (ANN) and learns the signal features based on the human perception knowledge. The proposed method is applied to a large acoustic dataset containing 24 months of nearly continuous recordings. The results show a significant improvement in performance of the detection-classification system; yielding as much as 20% improvement in true positive rate for a given false positive rate.