Abstract
Anthropogenic underwater sound is now recognized as a world-wide problem. Shipping, seismic surveys and pile driving, among some other human activities, have shown a broad range of negative effects in a variety of species. It is thus important to control, register and characterize these activities in order to establish policies that mitigate its effects. For this purpose, automatic detectors of the major anthropogenic sound categories (impulsive and tonal sounds) are needed. An efficient algorithm capable of detecting impulsive and tonal sound categories is proposed. The detection algorithm is based on the Pulsed to Tonal Ratio (PTR) and, in this work, we show not only its simplicity but also how well it performs in a variety of situations. In contrast to what happens with some other techniques, the proposed detector generally succeeds in detecting pulsed and tonal events with additive white and pink noise. This makes the PTR detector particularly appropriate for passive acoustic monitoring.
