Overview
Whistle and Moan Detector
Overview
The Whistle and Moan detector can be used to detect any tonal vocalisation, including odontocete whistles and baleen whale calls. Details of the operation of the detector are available in Gillespie et al, (2013).
The Whistle and Moan detector supersedes the old PAMGuard Whistle detector which should no longer be used.
The Whistle and Moan detector can be used alone, or with the Whistle Classifier which can be used to identify groups of whistles to species.
Creating a Whistle and Moan detector
From the File>Add modules>Detectors menu, or from the pop-up menu on the data model display, select “Whistle and Moan Detector”. Enter a descriptive name for the new detector (e.g. Whistle detector) and press OK.
General Principle of Detection
Detection is a multi-stage process, the main steps being
Computation of a spectrogram from raw audio data
Processing of the spectrogram to remove noise (especially clicks)
Thresholding to create a binary map of regions above threshold
Connecting regions of the binary map to create sounds
Breaking and then rejoining branches of complex regions (for instance, if two whistles cross)
References
Gillespie, D., Caillat, M., Gordon, J., and White, P. (2013). �Automatic detection and classification of odontocete whistles,� The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134, 2427�2437.