# Detecting the presence of sperm whales echolocation clicks in noisy environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00900 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00900/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Cetacean Translation Initiative: a roadmap to deciphering the communication of sperm whales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08614/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) navigate underwater with a series of impulsive, click-like sounds known as echolocation clicks. These clicks are characterized by a multipulse structure (MPS) that serves as a distinctive pattern. In this work, we use the stability of the MPS as a detection metric for recognizing and classifying the presence of clicks in noisy environments. To distinguish between noise transients and to handle simultaneous emissions from multiple sperm whales, our approach clusters a time series of MPS measures while removing potential clicks that do not fulfil the limits of inter-click interval, duration and spectrum. As a result, our approach can handle high noise transients and low signal-to-noise ratio. The performance of our detection approach is examined using three datasets: seven months of recordings from the Mediterranean Sea containing manually verified ambient noise; several days of manually labelled data collected from the Dominica Island containing approximately 40,000 clicks from multiple sperm whales; and a dataset from the Bahamas containing 1,203 labelled clicks from a single sperm whale. Comparing with the results of two benchmark detectors, a better trade-off between precision and recall is observed as well as a significant reduction in false detection rates, especially in noisy environments. To ensure reproducibility, we provide our database of labelled clicks along with our implementation code.