CLICK-SPOT: Event-Based Detection of Clicks and Echoes in Underwater Bioacoustics Using Multi-Representation Inputs

Hauer C, Nöth E, Arias-Vergara T, Maier A, Dobmeier T, Ivanovska T, Barnhill A, Bergler C, Vester H (2026)

Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2026

Original Authors: Christopher Hauer, Elmar Nöth, Tomás Arias-Vergara, Andreas Maier, Tobias Dobmeier, Tatyana Ivanovska, Alexander Barnhill, Christian Bergler, Heike Vester

Pages Range: 343-346

Event location: Zadar

DOI: 10.1109/ELMAR71231.2026.11712239

Abstract

Acoustic clicks in odontocetes are traditionally interpreted as biosonar signals, but growing evidence suggests broader social functions. Studying these behaviors requires reliable separation of clicks from closely related echoes, which remains challenging due to limited annotated data and overlapping transient events. We present CLICK-SPOT, an exploratory event-based approach for detecting clicks and echoes in underwater recordings. The method formulates the task as object detection on multi-representation audio inputs, combining waveform, spectrogram, and wavelet scalogram features in temporally aligned representations. A YOLO-based detector localizes acoustic events, followed by contextual post-processing for click-echo differentiation. On expert-annotated killer whale recordings, the method achieves 93.1% precision, 87.3% recall, and 90.2% F1-score for click detection, with strong agreement (r = 0.98) with human-derived click-rate estimates. Results indicate that event-based detection with contextual refinement can support analysis of dense impulsive bioacoustic signals under limited data conditions. This work explores event-based representations for click-echo analysis and highlights annotation-efficient approaches for future studies.

Authors with CRIS profile

Involved external institutions

Nord University / Nord universitet Norway (NO) Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule (OTH) Amberg-Weiden Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Hauer, C., Nöth, E., Arias-Vergara, T., Maier, A., Dobmeier, T., Ivanovska, T.,... Vester, H. (2026). CLICK-SPOT: Event-Based Detection of Clicks and Echoes in Underwater Bioacoustics Using Multi-Representation Inputs. In Proceedings of the 2026 International Symposium ELMAR (pp. 343-346). Zadar, HR.

MLA:

Hauer, Christopher, et al. "CLICK-SPOT: Event-Based Detection of Clicks and Echoes in Underwater Bioacoustics Using Multi-Representation Inputs." Proceedings of the 2026 International Symposium ELMAR, Zadar 2026. 343-346.

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