MobySound: A reference archive for studying automatic recognition of marine mammal sounds

A reference archive has been constructed to facilitate research on automatic recognition of marine mammal sounds. The archive enables researchers to have access to recorded sounds from a variety of marine species, sounds that can be very difficult to obtain in the field. The archive also lets researchers use different sound-recognition methods on a common set of sounds, making it possible to compare directly the effectiveness of the different methods. In recognizing sounds in a given recording, the type and frequency of noise present has a strong effect on the difficulty of the recognition problem; a measure of the amount of interference was devised, the “time-local, in-band, signal-to-noise ratio”, and was applied to each sound in the archive. Current entries in the archive comprise low-frequency sounds of large whales, and have about 14,000 vocalizations from eight species of baleen whales. MobySound may be accessed at http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/projects/MobySound/. Contributions to the archive are welcomed.