Comparison of passive acoustic soniferous fish monitoring with supervised and unsupervised approaches

Passive acoustics has been used to investigate behavior and relative abundances of soniferous fish. However, because of noise interferences, it remains challenging to accurately analyze acoustic activities of soniferous fish. This study proposes a multi-method approach, which combines rule-based detector, periodicity-coded non-negative matrix factorization, and Gaussian mixture models. Although the three methods performed well when used to detect croaker choruses in quiet conditions, inconsistent results are observed in noisy conditions. A consistency matrix can provide insights regarding the bias of acoustic monitoring results. The results suggest that the proposed approach can reasonably improve passive acoustic monitoring of soniferous fish.