  Effective conservation of maritime environments and wildlife management of
endangered species require the implementation of efficient, accurate and
scalable solutions for environmental monitoring. Ecoacoustics offers the
advantages of non-invasive, long-duration sampling of environmental sounds and
has the potential to become the reference tool for biodiversity surveying.
However, the analysis and interpretation of acoustic data is a time-consuming
process that often requires a great amount of human supervision. This issue
might be tackled by exploiting modern techniques for automatic audio signal
analysis, which have recently achieved impressive performance thanks to the
advances in deep learning research. In this paper we show that convolutional
neural networks can indeed significantly outperform traditional automatic
methods in a challenging detection task: identification of dolphin whistles
from underwater audio recordings. The proposed system can detect signals even
in the presence of ambient noise, at the same time consistently reducing the
likelihood of producing false positives and false negatives. Our results
further support the adoption of artificial intelligence technology to improve
the automatic monitoring of marine ecosystems.
