HotPopRobot

Artash Nath.

At the 2024 Canada-Wide Science Fair, my project using deep learning to detect whales and measure ocean noise from underwater sound won the Youth Can Innovate Award, a $7,000 national prize, along with a Silver Excellence Award and several other awards.

The Problem: A Noisier Ocean

The ocean is becoming louder. Shipping, sonar, and construction add underwater noise that disrupts how whales communicate, navigate, and feed, and raises the risk of whale-ship collisions. To protect marine mammals, we first need to know which species are present and how much human-made noise they face, in near real time and at scale.

A Two-Stage Deep Learning Model

I built a deep learning system that works directly on broadband hydrophone (underwater microphone) recordings, converting the sound into spectrograms and analysing them in two stages:

• Supervised stage: a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on more than 5,000 labelled spectrogram samples of Blue and Humpback whale calls, to detect and classify known species.
• Unsupervised stage: Convolutional Variational Autoencoders (CVAEs) that group unfamiliar biophonic sounds into clusters, so new or unlabelled calls can be discovered instead of missed.

Results

The model identifies Blue and Humpback whale calls with 98.7% accuracy, flags previously unidentified sounds for further study, and quantifies underwater noise from human activity. Because it runs on open hydrophone data, the same pipeline can be applied to other regions and species.

The Canada-Wide Science Fair and the Awards

The Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF) is Canada’s largest youth STEM competition, organised by Youth Science Canada. Each year it brings together hundreds of finalists who have qualified through regional science fairs across the country. CWSF 2024 was held from 26 to 31 May 2024 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, where my project was recognised with several national awards:

• Youth Can Innovate Award (Senior) — $7,000 cash (Gwyn Morgan & Patricia Trottier Foundation)
• Excellence Award, Silver Medal (Senior)
• Canadian Acoustical Association Award (Senior) — $1,000 plus a subscription to the association’s journal
• The Actuarial Foundation of Canada Award (Senior) — $1,000
• The Beaty Centre for Species Discovery Award — $500 plus a Canadian Museum of Nature family membership
• Senior Silver Medallist entrance scholarships from Carleton, Dalhousie, Mount Allison, the University of New Brunswick, the University of Ottawa, and Western

Explore the Project

• Deep Learning for Marine Mammal Conservation on ProjectBoard
• YOU-Oceans — turning underwater sound into intelligence for ocean monitoring