Automatic classification of killer whale vocalizations using dynamic time warping.

A set of killer whale sounds from Marineland were recently classified automatically [Brown et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, EL34-EL40 (2006)] into call types using dynamic time warping (DTW), multidimensional scaling, and kmeans clustering to give near-perfect agreement with a perceptual classification. Here the effectiveness of four DTW algorithms on a larger and much more challenging set of calls by Northern Resident whales will be examined, with each call consisting of two independently modulated pitch contours and having considerable overlap in contours for several of the perceptual call types. Classification results are given for each of the four algorithms for the low frequency contour (LFC), the high frequency contour (HFC), their derivatives, and weighted sums of the distances corresponding to LFC with HFC, LFC with its derivative, and HFC with its derivative. The best agreement with the perceptual classification was 90% attained by the Sakoe-Chiba algorithm for the low frequency contours alone.