Weakly Supervised Multiple Instance Learning for Whale Call Detection and Localization in Long-Duration Passive Acoustic Monitoring

2025-02-28

AI Summary

Accurate detection and localization of cetacean calls in long-term passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) remain challenging due to the absence of precise temporal annotations and the computational difficulty of processing audio segments lasting 2–30 minutes. Method: We propose a weakly supervised dual-stream DSMIL-LocNet framework that operates solely on bag-level labels. It integrates time-frequency spectral modeling with a dual-stream attention mechanism and introduces an attention-based instance selection strategy, enabling joint optimization of long-context classification and medium-length instance localization. Contribution/Results: This work presents the first large-scale validation of multi-instance learning (MIL) scalability in marine PAM. Evaluated on an Antarctic cetacean dataset, our method achieves detection F1-scores of 0.8–0.9 and localization accuracy of 0.65–0.70, significantly reducing annotation effort while enabling end-to-end analysis of long-duration audio.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Multimodal Learning
• Natural Language Processing: Language Grounding & Multi-modal NLP
• Search and Optimization: Local Search

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

Marine ecosystem monitoring via Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) generates vast data, but deep learning often requires precise annotations and short segments. We introduce DSMIL-LocNet, a Multiple Instance Learning framework for whale call detection and localization using only bag-level labels. Our dual-stream model processes 2-30 minute audio segments, leveraging spectral and temporal features with attention-based instance selection. Tests on Antarctic whale data show longer contexts improve classification (F1: 0.8-0.9) while medium instances ensure localization precision (0.65-0.70). This suggests MIL can enhance scalable marine monitoring. Code: https://github.com/Ragib-Amin-Nihal/DSMIL-Loc

Problem

• Detects and localizes whale calls using weak supervision
• Processes long audio segments with minimal annotations
• Improves marine monitoring scalability with MIL framework

Innovation

• Uses Multiple Instance Learning for whale detection
• Processes long audio segments with dual-stream model
• Leverages spectral and temporal features with attention