Bird and whale species identification using sound images

Image identification of animals is mostly centred on identifying them based on their appearance, but there are other ways images can be used to identify animals, including by representing the sounds they make with images. In this study, the authors present a novel and effective approach for automated identification of birds and whales using some of the best texture descriptors in the computer vision literature. The visual features of sounds are built starting from the audio file and are taken from images constructed from different spectrograms and from harmonic and percussion images. These images are divided into sub-windows from which sets of texture descriptors are extracted. The experiments reported in this study using a dataset of Bird vocalisations targeted for species recognition and a dataset of right whale calls targeted for whale detection (as well as three well-known benchmarks for music genre classification) demonstrate that the fusion of different texture features enhances performance. The experiments also demonstrate that the fusion of different texture features with audio features is not only comparable with existing audio signal approaches but also statistically improves some of the stand-alone audio features. The code for the experiments will be publicly available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/bguw035yrqz0pwp/ElencoCode.docx?dl=0.