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Methods for the automatic recognition of low‐frequency sounds of baleen whales are presented. Matched filtering is implemented with a synthetic filter kernel derived from measurements of whale sounds, and this method is found effective at detecting blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) sounds in white background noise. Spectrogram correlation is implemented and found effective at detection of blue whale vocalizations in the presence of interfering sounds. Spectrogram correlation employs image correlation using spectrograms and carefully designed image kernels to give good performance in the presence of noise. The two methods are briefly compared. The effectiveness of the spectrogram correlator is also demonstrated with finback whale (B. physalus) sounds. A supplementary method for detecting regular, repetitive sequences of sounds is applied to minke whale (B. acutorostrata) pulse trains, and found to improve detection in conditions of high ambient noise.
Mellinger et al. (Wed,) studied this question.