Automatic recognition of fin and blue whale calls for real-time monitoring in the St. Lawrence

Monitoring blue and fin whales summering in the St. Lawrence Estuary with passive acoustics requires call recognition algorithms that can cope with the heavy shipping noise of the St. Lawrence Seaway and with multipath propagation characteristics that generate overlapping copies of the calls. In this paper, the performance of three time-frequency methods aiming at such automatic detection and classification is tested on more than 2000 calls and compared at several levels of signal-to-noise ratio using typical recordings collected in this area. For all methods, image processing techniques are used to reduce the noise in the spectrogram. The first approach consists in matching the spectrogram with binary time-frequency templates of the calls (coincidence of spectrograms). The second approach is based on the extraction of the frequency contours of the calls and their classification using dynamic time warping (DTW) and the vector quantization (VQ) algorithms. The coincidence of spectrograms was the fastest method and performed better for blue whale A and B calls. VQ detected more 20 Hz fin whale calls but with a higher false alarm rate. DTW and VQ outperformed for the more variable blue whale D calls.