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CABLE 1.0 is now available for download |
CABLE (Cachalot
Automatic Body Length Estimator) is a program for automatically estimating the
size distributions of sperm whales heard clicking in acoustic recordings. It was developed
by Wilfried Beslin as part
of a Master of Science thesis project at Dalhousie University under the
supervision of Hal Whitehead, with the collaboration of Shane Gero and the Dominica Sperm Whale Project: http://www.thespermwhaleproject.org.
CABLE
was developed using MATLAB version R2015a. It is a standalone application,
meaning that MATLAB is not required to run it. The program is available to
download for anyone who wants to use it. Please review this page before
proceeding to download CABLE.
Measuring body
length acoustically is possible with sperm whales, because their clicks have a
unique feature: they are composed of multiple pulses, where the inter-pulse
interval (IPI) increases with body size.
CABLE works by
measuring IPIs from clicks that display a clear multi-pulsed structure. It
recognizes these “Good” clicks by using a machine learning
technique called a Support Vector Machine (SVM), followed by additional quality
control checks.
The advantage
of CABLE’s algorithm is that it is fully automatic, and it enables the estimation
of IPIs from multiple sperm whales clicking simultaneously, with no need to
resolve individual click trains. CABLE can work with audio recordings that have
only one channel.
CABLE is a standalone application built for the
Windows operating system using MATLAB Compiler and MATLAB version R2015a. It
will only work on Windows operating systems (64-bit).
MATLAB itself is not needed to run CABLE. However,
unless you happen to have a full installation of MATLAB R2015a and MATLAB
Compiler SDK, you will need MATLAB Runtime. MATLAB Runtime is made
freely available by The Mathworks, Inc. at:
https://www.mathworks.com/products/compiler/matlab-runtime.html.
Before running CABLE, make sure you have downloaded
and installed MATLAB Runtime R2015a (8.5).
CABLE itself comes in a "zip" folder and
does not require installation. Simply place the program directory anywhere
where you have write and execute permissions.
The
algorithm used by CABLE is described in:
Beslin, W. A. M.,
Whitehead, H., and Gero, S. (2018). “Automatic acoustic estimation of sperm whale size
distributions achieved through machine recognition of on-axis clicks”. The
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 144, 3485-3495. doi: 10.1121/1.5082291
Please
cite this article if you use CABLE.
Once you have reviewed this page, you may use the links below to view the
user manual, download MATLAB Runtime, and download CABLE itself. Remember, CABLE will not work without MATLAB Runtime
version R2015a (8.5).
Please review the user manual before using CABLE. The manual is also
included in the full CABLE download.
Updated by Wilfried Beslin, Jan 2019