Bioacoustics for North Atlantic Right Whale Detection Based on Deep Learning

Climate change, pollution, shipping lanes and other man-made factors are significantly impacting the biodiversity of our planet. Whales represent some of the most endangered animals of our time with some species, such as the North Atlantic right whales, have fewer than 400 individuals left. These large mammals play a crucial role in maintaining the health of our planet due to their various attributes, such as their carbon sequestration abilities. Detecting, classifying and tracking these whales can provide us with tools for their management. Passive acoustic monitoring allows researchers to identify whales through audio recordings based on their unique sounds. We propose detecting North Atlantic right whales using passive acoustic monitoring audio clips. Our data consists of whale upcalls collected in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine. In our work, we compare various audio visualization transformations such as the wavelet transformation, Short-Time Fourier Transform and a custom algorithm. Using the visualized audio, our goal is to use various deep learning algorithms to detect whales. We employed multiple pre-trained convolutional neural network algorithms, including DenseNetl21, EfficientNetB7 and Xception. the wavelet transformation achieved the best overall results with a validation accuracy of 90% on most detection algorithms. Specifically, DenseNet169 combined with the wavelet transformation achieved the highest accuracy of 90.39%. Using ensemble learning on the best performing algorithms, we increased the accuracy of our approach to 91.86 %. Overall, our results demonstrate the strong potential of using audio visualization with deep learning algorithms to detect North Atlantic right whales. Further work in this field, such as exploring more algorithms, could further enhance the effectiveness of our approach.