Signal detection software

Omura’s whale detector

Omura’s whales (Balaenoptera omurai) occur in tropical waters off western and northern Australia. They produce song by repeating an amplitude-modulated low-frequency (15-62 Hz; 12-15s) vocalisation every 160-210s. The detector looks for this sound. It computes a spectrogram and then the Shannon entropy of the spectrogram looking for non-random pixels. The detector consists of three files: OmuraEntropy2XSTD_JASA.m, which calls imageEntropy.m and spectha2M.m. You need MATLAB (The MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA, USA) to run the detector.

Reference
Madhusudhana, S., Murray, A., and Erbe, C. (2020). Automatic detectors for low-frequency vocalizations of Omura’s whales, Balaenoptera omurai: A performance comparison. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(5), 3078-3090, doi: 10.1121/10.0001108.

Download Omura's whale detector software

Automatic detectors for pygmy blue whale song, fin whale 20-Hz downsweeps, and the ‘spot’ call are incorporated in the CHORUS software package, for download here.