New noise-cutting tech could pinpoint North Atlantic right whales and other species
Fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales remain in the wild, and not even 100 of them are breeding females.
Protecting these whales, such as by diverting boats from dangerous encounters, requires locating them more reliably-and new technology, described in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, could help make that possible.
The recorded audio is converted into spectrograms: visual representations of sound used to pinpoint specific whale species' calls.
Now researchers have trained two deep-learning models specifically to cut through the noise.
They started by giving the models thousands of "Clean" spectrograms with only North Atlantic right whale calls.
The resulting algorithms can successfully turn noisy spectrograms into clean ones, cutting down on false alarms and helping spot whales before they reach dangerous areas, the scientists say.
"Humpback whales and dolphins have much more complex speech pathways than the right whale," he notes.
University of St. Andrews behavioral ecologist Peter Tyack, who was not involved in the study, says this new system should be used to figure out where whales are throughout the year, so that these areas can be protected.
"In terms of estimating the density and abundance of these whales in places where it's hard to see them," Tyack says, "This technology could be fantastic."
In his work, Tyack has found that North Atlantic right whales can be silent for hours at a time-so passive acoustic monitoring could easily miss one.