Applying machine-learning based source separation techniques in the analysis of marine soundscapes

Abstract

Long-term monitoring of underwater soundscapes provides us a large number of acoustic recordings to study a marine ecosystem. Characteristics of a marine ecosystem, such as the habitat quality, composition of marine fauna, and the level of human interference, may be analyzed using information relevant to environmental sound, biological sound, and anthropogenic sound. Supervised source separation techniques have been widely employed in speech and music separation tasks, but it may not be practical for the analysis of marine soundscapes due to the lack of a database that includes a large mount of paired pure and mixed signals. Even when the paired data is not available, different sound sources with unique spectral or temporal patterns may still be separated by apply semi-supervised or unsupervised learning algorithms. In this presentation, supervised and unsupervised source separation techniques will be demonstrated on long-term spectrograms of a marine soundscape. Separation performances under different levels of simultaneous source influence will also be discussed. In the future, more advanced techniques of source separation are necessary to facilitate the soundscape-based marine ecosystem sensing. An open database of marine soundscape will promote the development of machine learning-based source separation. Therefore, we will open acoustic data tested in this presentation on the Asian Soundscape to encourage the open science of marine soundscape.