# Learning Deep Models from Synthetic Data for Extracting Dolphin Whistle Contours

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08894/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Learning Stage-wise GANs for Whistle Extraction in Time-Frequency Spectrograms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02714/) (2023)
- [Automated Detection of Dolphin Whistles with Convolutional Networks and Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15406/) (2022)
- [The Effects of Signal-to-Noise Ratio on Generative Adversarial Networks Applied to Marine Bioacoustic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14806/) (2023)
- [Advancing Marine Bioacoustics with Deep Generative Models: A Hybrid Augmentation Strategy for Southern Resident Killer Whale Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21872/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a learning-based method for extracting whistles of toothed whales (Odontoceti) in hydrophone recordings. Our method represents audio signals as time-frequency spectrograms and decomposes each spectrogram into a set of time-frequency patches. A deep neural network learns archetypical patterns (e.g., crossings, frequency modulated sweeps) from the spectrogram patches and predicts time-frequency peaks that are associated with whistles. We also developed a comprehensive method to synthesize training samples from background environments and train the network with minimal human annotation effort. We applied the proposed learn-from-synthesis method to a subset of the public Detection, Classification, Localization, and Density Estimation (DCLDE) 2011 workshop data to extract whistle confidence maps, which we then processed with an existing contour extractor to produce whistle annotations. The F1-score of our best synthesis method was 0.158 greater than our baseline whistle extraction algorithm (~25% improvement) when applied to common dolphin (Delphinus spp.) and bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) whistles.