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Main Authors: Geldenhuys, Christiaan M., Tonitz, Günther, Niesler, Thomas R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21280
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author Geldenhuys, Christiaan M.
Tonitz, Günther
Niesler, Thomas R.
author_facet Geldenhuys, Christiaan M.
Tonitz, Günther
Niesler, Thomas R.
contents While recent sound event detection (SED) systems can identify baleen whale calls in marine audio, challenges related to false positive and minority-class detection persist. We propose the boundary proposal network (BPN), which extends an existing lightweight SED system. The BPN is inspired by work in image object detection and aims to reduce the number of false positive detections. It achieves this by using intermediate latent representations computed within the backbone classification model to gate the final output. When added to an existing SED system, the BPN achieves a 16.8 % absolute increase in precision, as well as 21.3 % and 9.4 % improvements in the F1-score for minority-class d-calls and bp-calls, respectively. We further consider two approaches to the selection of post-processing hyperparameters: a forward-search and a backward-search. By separately optimising event-level and frame-level hyperparameters, these two approaches lead to considerable performance improvements over parameters selected using empirical methods. The complete WhaleVAD-BPN system achieves a cross-validated development F1-score of 0.475, which is a 9.8 % absolute improvement over the baseline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_21280
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WhaleVAD-BPN: Improving Baleen Whale Call Detection with Boundary Proposal Networks and Post-processing Optimisation
Geldenhuys, Christiaan M.
Tonitz, Günther
Niesler, Thomas R.
Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Sound
Quantitative Methods
While recent sound event detection (SED) systems can identify baleen whale calls in marine audio, challenges related to false positive and minority-class detection persist. We propose the boundary proposal network (BPN), which extends an existing lightweight SED system. The BPN is inspired by work in image object detection and aims to reduce the number of false positive detections. It achieves this by using intermediate latent representations computed within the backbone classification model to gate the final output. When added to an existing SED system, the BPN achieves a 16.8 % absolute increase in precision, as well as 21.3 % and 9.4 % improvements in the F1-score for minority-class d-calls and bp-calls, respectively. We further consider two approaches to the selection of post-processing hyperparameters: a forward-search and a backward-search. By separately optimising event-level and frame-level hyperparameters, these two approaches lead to considerable performance improvements over parameters selected using empirical methods. The complete WhaleVAD-BPN system achieves a cross-validated development F1-score of 0.475, which is a 9.8 % absolute improvement over the baseline.
title WhaleVAD-BPN: Improving Baleen Whale Call Detection with Boundary Proposal Networks and Post-processing Optimisation
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Sound
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21280