The Signal Processing Group (GTS) of the iTEAM Institute at Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has developed SAMLab (Submarine Acoustic Monitoring Laboratory), a software platform designed to analyse large volumes of underwater acoustic recordings.
One of the main challenges of marine acoustic monitoring is the huge amount of data generated during campaigns that can last for weeks or months. SAMLab facilitates the exploration of these long time series and enables users to quickly locate acoustic events of interest through a visual representation of the entire campaign, from which temporal patterns can be identified and users can directly access the corresponding section of the recording.
The tool allows users to visualise spectrograms, play audio segments, make manual annotations, and run automatic detection algorithms on both individual files and entire campaigns.
SAMLab incorporates detectors for vocalisations from several cetacean species, as well as anthropogenic sounds. It features a modular plugin-based architecture that allows new detection algorithms for different species and acoustic events to be integrated without the need to develop a new interface.
Developed in Python, the software can work with recordings from different underwater acoustic monitoring systems and allows results to be exported in formats such as Excel and HDF5 for further analysis. In addition, SAMLab is released under the GNU GPLv3 licence, facilitating its use and further development by the research community.
More information and source code: https://github.com/SAMLab-UPV/SAMLab