REVIEW article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Ocean Observation
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1567001
This article is part of the Research TopicRemote Sensing Applications in Marine Ecology Monitoring and Target SensingView all 15 articles
Survey of Detection Techniques for Sperm Whales and Dolphins Clicks
Provisionally accepted
- University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
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Echolocation clicks, emitted by Sperm Whales (Physeter macrocephalus) and Dolphins for foraging, echolocation and socialization, serve as bioindicators for monitoring marine ecosystems.Detecting click signals provides information on the abundance of species, their behavior and their responses to environmental changes. This paper provides a survey of the many detection and classification methodologies for clicks, ranging from 2002 to 2023. We divide the surveyed techniques into categories by their methodology. Specifically, feature analysis (e.g., phase, ICI and duration), frequency content, energy-based detection, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, template matching and adaptive detection approaches. Also surveyed are open access platforms for click detections, and databases openly available for testing. Details of the method applied for each paper are given along with advantages and limitations, and for each category we analyze the remaining challenges. The paper also includes a performance comparison for several schemes over a shared database. Finally, we provide tables summarizing the existing detection schemes in terms of challenges address, methods, detection and classification tools applied, features used and applications.
Keywords: Sperm whale clicks, bioacoustics, Passive acoustic monitoring, Acoustic detection, acoustic database
Received: 26 Jan 2025; Accepted: 01 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Diamant, Gracic and Gubnisky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Roee Diamant, roee.d@univ.haifa.ac.il
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