Even today, the current understanding and interpretation of animal-specific vocalization paradigms is largely based on historical and manual data analysis considering comparatively small data corpora, primarily because of time- and human-resource limitations, next to the scarcity of available species-related machine-learning techniques. Partial human-based data inspections neither represent the overall real-world vocal repertoire, nor the variations within intra- and inter animal-specific call type portfolios, typically resulting only in small collections of category-specific ground truth data. Modern machine (deep) learning concepts are an essential requirement to identify statistically significant animal-related vocalization patterns within massive bioacoustic data archives. However, the applicability of pure supervised training approaches is challenging, due to limited call-specific ground truth data, combined with strong class-imbalances between individual call type events. The current study is the first presenting a deep bioacoustic signal generation framework, entitled ORCA-WHISPER, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), trained on low-resource killer whale (Orcinus Orca) call type data. Besides audiovisual inspection, supervised call type classification, and model transferability, the auspicious quality of generated fake vocalizations was further demonstrated by visualizing, representing, and enhancing the real-world orca signal data manifold. Moreover, previous orca/noise segmentation results were outperformed by integrating fake signals to the original data partition.
Cite as: Bergler, C., Barnhill, A., Perrin, D., Schmitt, M., Maier, A., Nöth, E. (2022) ORCA-WHISPER: An Automatic Killer Whale Sound Type Generation Toolkit Using Deep Learning. Proc. Interspeech 2022, 2413-2417, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-846
@inproceedings{bergler22_interspeech,
author={Christian Bergler and Alexander Barnhill and Dominik Perrin and Manuel Schmitt and Andreas Maier and Elmar Nöth},
title={{ORCA-WHISPER: An Automatic Killer Whale Sound Type Generation Toolkit Using Deep Learning}},
year=2022,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2022},
pages={2413--2417},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2022-846}
}