WhaleNet: a Novel Deep Learning Architecture for Marine Mammals Vocalizations on Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database
This work addresses the problem of accurately classifying diverse marine mammal vocalizations for researchers in marine biology and acoustics, representing an incremental advancement through a novel hybrid method.
The paper tackled the classification of marine mammal vocalizations from the Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database by introducing WhaleNet, a deep ensemble architecture that uses Wavelet Scattering Transform and Mel spectrogram for feature extraction, achieving a classification accuracy of 97.61%, which is an 8-10% improvement over existing methods.
Marine mammal communication is a complex field, hindered by the diversity of vocalizations and environmental factors. The Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database (WMMD) constitutes a comprehensive labeled dataset employed in machine learning applications. Nevertheless, the methodologies for data preparation, preprocessing, and classification documented in the literature exhibit considerable variability and are typically not applied to the dataset in its entirety. This study initially undertakes a concise review of the state-of-the-art benchmarks pertaining to the dataset, with a particular focus on clarifying data preparation and preprocessing techniques. Subsequently, we explore the utilization of the Wavelet Scattering Transform (WST) and Mel spectrogram as preprocessing mechanisms for feature extraction. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{WhaleNet} (Wavelet Highly Adaptive Learning Ensemble Network), a sophisticated deep ensemble architecture for the classification of marine mammal vocalizations, leveraging both WST and Mel spectrogram for enhanced feature discrimination. By integrating the insights derived from WST and Mel representations, we achieved an improvement in classification accuracy by $8-10\%$ over existing architectures, corresponding to a classification accuracy of $97.61\%$.