Using timelapse cameras and machine learning to enhance acoustic monitoring of small boat sound

Systematic review of machine learning methods applied to ecoacoustics and soundscape monitoring

“…Promissory studies such as in [98] establish opportunities using soundscape methodologies to monitor landscape-level changes in biodiversity and the complementarity of species coverage to other monitoring methods. This approach of integrating several kinds of sensors has been exposed as an essential way to complement the information of soundscape [98] , [111] , [22] , [11] . Nevertheless, the first step to integrating sensors is to promote the use of ARUs and expand the spatial range.…”

Deep-Learning-Based detection of recreational vessels in an estuarine soundscape in the May River, South Carolina, USA

“…Many tools, including accelerometer sensors [ 16 , 17 ], high-definition cameras [ 18 , 19 ], radars [ 20 , 21 ], and wireless sensor networks [ 16 , 21 ] have been widely used to track vessels. Due to the advancement of recording technology, researchers have also collected underwater sounds at very short time intervals (e.g., continuously, 20-min, or 60-min) and over long-term scales (i.e., years and decades).…”

“…Convolutional neural networks (CNN) [ 29 , 32 ] and hidden Markov models (HMMs) [ 33 ] have been applied, and Frequency Amplitude Variation (FAV) signature [ 34 ] has also been investigated in the detection process. Most recently, Wilson [ 19 ], in 2022, used a CNN method to count boats in images and further analyzed the relationship between the soundscape and the number of boats. Research results demonstrated potential applications for boat monitoring at remote sites.…”

“…Research [ 36 ] applied similar methods (CNN, LSTM-RNN, and GRU-RNN) as [ 32 ], however, it used AIS messages for tracking vessels’ trajectories. Research [ 19 ] used CNN to monitor boats without the assistance of AIS, however, higher-resolution cameras are needed to get quality timelapse images of moving objects. Thus, an efficient detection method for vessel noise that works in biologically rich, sound environments (e.g., estuarine soundscapes) would be valuable.…”