Automatic taxonomic classification of fish based on their acoustic signals

Abstract

Fish as well as birds, mammals, insects and other animals are capable of emitting sounds for diverse purposes, which can be recorded through microphone sensors. Although fish vocalizations have been known for a long time, they have been poorly studied and applied in their taxonomic classification. This work presents a novel approach for automatic remote acoustic identification of fish through their acoustic signals by applying pattern recognition techniques. The sound signals are preprocessed and automatically segmented to extract each call from the background noise. Then, the calls are parameterized using Linear and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (LFCC and MFCC), Shannon Entropy (SE) and Syllable Length (SL), yielding useful information for the classification phase. In our experiments, 102 different fish species have been successfully identified with three widely used machine learning algorithms: K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Experimental results show an average classification accuracy of 95.24%, 93.56% and 95.58%, respectively.