QiandaoEar22: a high-quality noise dataset for identifying specific ship from multiple underwater acoustic targets using ship-radiated noise

Target identification of ship-radiated noise is a crucial area in underwater target recognition. However, there is currently a lack of multi-target ship datasets that accurately represent real-world underwater acoustic conditions. To tackle this issue, we conducted experimental data acquisition, resulting in the release of QiandaoEar22—a comprehensive underwater acoustic multi-target dataset. This dataset encompasses 9 h and 28 min of real-world ship-radiated noise data and 21 h and 58 min of background noise data. To demonstrate the availability of QiandaoEar22, we executed two experimental tasks. The first task focuses on assessing the presence of ship-radiated noise, while the second task involves identifying specific ships within the recognized targets in the multi-ship mixed data. In the latter task, we extracted eight features from the data and employed six deep learning networks for classification, aiming to evaluate and compare the performance of various features and networks. The experimental results reveal that ship-radiated noise can be identified from background noise in over 99% of cases. For the specific identification of individual ships, the optimal recognition accuracy achieves 99.56%. Finally, we found using spectrum and MFCC as feature inputs and DenseNet as classifier can achieve excellent recognition performance. Considering the computational efficiency, CRNN and ECAPA-TDNN are also good choices. Our work not only establishes a benchmark for algorithm evaluation but also inspires the development of innovative methods to enhance underwater acoustic target detection (UATD) and underwater acoustic target recognition (UATR).