Teaching a computer to know a whale from a single song

A single whale call can teach a computer to recognize that species. Scientists took one blue whale song and created thousands of fake versions by changing its pitch, speed, and background noise. A neural network trained on only those fake calls found real blue whale calls with 99.4 percent accuracy. The training took hours on a laptop instead of weeks on powerful computers. Blue whale songs are very similar within a population, so one example is enough. Madagascar whales sing one tune and Antarctic whales sing another. The team will now apply their detector to 25 years of ocean recordings.

License: TypeCram Original