Xanadu C. Halkias
Email: xanadu@ee.columbia.edu
Tel: +1 (212) 877-3467
Overview of Audio Processing Methods in Marine Mammal Vocalizations
Marine mammals have always fascinated scientists. Their disposition, as well as
their ability to communicate over large distances while in a harsh environment has lead
researchers to study them extensively and hypothesize on their intelligence. There is great
interest in understanding how marine mammals use vocalization for communication and
navigation. This understanding requires detailed analysis of enormous amounts of audio,
an otherwise intractable process that can be greatly aided by automation. However,
advances in automatic processing in marine mammal bioacoustics are minimal compared
to that of human speech analysis.
There exist three major problems in audio processing of marine mammal
vocalizations: 1. Call detection/extraction, 2. Localization and 3. Echolocation
reproduction/sonar. In this talk, I will focus on call detection /extraction. First, I will
review the methods used in the existing literature. Then, I will provide an introduction to
the tools that are widely used for speech recognition, such as linear predictive coding
(LPC) and Hidden Markov Models (HMM), and explain how they can be applied in
marine mammal bioacoustics in order to detect calls in a manner that lends itself to
analysis.
About the speaker:
Xanadu Halkias is currently pursuing doctoral studies at Columbia University in audio
processing and statistical pattern recognition with Prof. Dan Ellis. She received her M.S.
degree from National Technical University of Athens, Greece. This work is under the
auspices of LabROSA (Laboratory for Recognition and Organization of Speech and
Audio), whose aim is to apply advanced techniques in speech recognition towards
problems sound understanding.
For more information you can visit: http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~xanadu