Strategies for orca call retrieval to support collaborative annotation of a large archive

Steven R. Ness, Alex Lerch, George Tzanetakis

Abstract: The Orchive is a large audio archive of hydrophone recordings of Killer whale (Orcinus orca) vocalizations. Researchers and users from around the world can interact with the archive using a collaborative web-based annotation, visualization and retrieval interface. In addition a mobile client has been written in order to crowdsource Orca call annotation. In this paper we describe and compare different strategies for the retrieval of discrete Orca calls. In addition, the results of the automatic analysis are integrated in the user interface facilitating annotation as well as leveraging the existing annotations for supervised learning. The best strategy achieves a mean average precision of 0.77 with the first retrieved item being relevant 95% of the time in a dataset of 185 calls belonging to 4 types.