Separation of overlapping sources in bioacoustic mixtures

Abstract

Source separation is an important step to study signals that are not easy or possible to record individually. Common methods such as deep clustering, however, cannot be applied to signals of an unknown number of sources and/or signals that overlap in time and/or frequency—a common problem in bioacoustic recordings. This work presents an approach, using a supervised learning framework, to parse individual sources from a spectrogram of a mixture that contains a variable number of overlapping sources. This method isolates individual sources in the time-frequency domain using only one function but in two separate steps, one for the detection of the number of sources and corresponding bounding boxes, and a second step for the segmentation in which masks of individual sounds are extracted. This approach handles the full separation of overlapping sources in both time and frequency using deep neural networks in an applicable manner to other tasks such as bird audio detection. This paper presents method and reports on its performance to parse individual bat signals from recordings containing hundreds of overlapping bat echolocation signals. This method can be extended to other bioacoustic recordings with a variable number of sources and signals that overlap in time and/or frequency.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2020
Source ID
10.1121/10.0000932

Entities

People

  • Laura N Kloepper
  • Mohammad Rasool Izadi
  • Robert Stevenson

Organizations

  • Office of Naval Reactors
  • Office of Naval Research
  • Saint Mary's College
  • University of Notre Dame

Tags

Readers

  • Marine Mammal Biology
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks