Abstract
Bioacoustic research of reptile calls and vocalizations has been limited due to the general consideration that they are voiceless. However, several species of geckos, turtles, and crocodiles are abletoproducesimpleandevencomplexvocalizationswhicharespecies-specific.Thisworkpresents a novel approach for the automatic taxonomic identification of reptiles through their bioacoustics by applying pattern recognition techniques. The sound signals are automatically segmented, extracting each call from the background noise. Then, their calls are parametrized using Linear and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (LFCC and MFCC) to serve as features in the classification stage. In this study, 27 reptile species have been successfully identified using two machine learning algorithms: K-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Experimental results show an average classification accuracy of 97.78% and 98.51%, respectively.
Highlights
The taxonomic class Reptilia is formed by turtles, crocodiles, snakes, lizards, and tuataras, of which some are able of vocalize [1], but they do not do it often
Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) hold insufficient information because the area under the triangular filters used in the mel-filterbank analysis increases at higher frequencies
It has been concluded that MFCCs are able to represent the reptile call efficiently because their acoustic signals are emitted predominantly in low frequencies
Summary
The taxonomic class Reptilia is formed by turtles, crocodiles, snakes, lizards, and tuataras, of which some are able of vocalize [1], but they do not do it often. Some geckos, crocodiles, and turtles are very active in producing vocalizations [2,3], but their social roles are still not fully understood. Crocodiles are probably the most vocal reptiles, with a rich variety of hissing, distress, and threatening calls due to their close relation with birds, they are even capable of vocalizing in the egg before hatching [4]. Some species such as turtles, crocodiles, and alligators can emit sound both in air and underwater [5]. Reptiles emit vocalizations in a broad range of frequencies—they produce sounds mainly between
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