Efficient Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Killer Whales Using a Two-Stage Detection and Ecotype Classification Cascade
Passive acoustic monitoring of killer whales is particularly important for conservation of the endangered Southern Resident killer whale population, but requires accurate models that can operate in real time under severe class imbalance and deployment shift. We propose a lightweight ResNet-based two-stage cascade that first detects killer whale vocalizations and then classifies confident detections into five eastern North Pacific ecotypes, abstaining on ambiguous calls. We train and evaluate the pipeline on the DCLDE 2027 dataset, where the detector achieves 0.960 macro-F1 and the classifier 0.958, outperforming frozen Perch 2.0 embeddings on the five-ecotype benchmark. By separating dete...
| Authors | Daniela Ruiz, Manuel Castellote, Zhongqi Miao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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