2-Dimensional spectral gating for denoising bioacoustics recordings
Abstract
Isolating vocalizations from noise in bioacoustics recordings is a prerequisite to many ecological analyses, including species identification, animal communication understanding, and individual or population-level variability studies. However, when recordings are acquired in open environments, vocalizations, noise, or signal-to-noise ratio can vary widely across individuals, species, environment, and recording conditions, making it hard to develop robust and generalizable methods for ecological analyses. To account for these challenges, noise reduction techniques are used to remove noise before downstream analyses. Popular methods such as Noisereduce rely on spectral gating, which estimates a noise threshold for each frequency channel. We propose a further improvement to Noisereduce, leveraging the fact that most animal sounds have structure across multiple frequencies. We apply our method on bird and marine mammals recordings and show that our extension of Noisereduce leads to improved denoising in both above and under water acoustic recordings, without impacting speed of preprocessing.
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BibTeX
@misc{boussard20262dimensional,
title = {{2-Dimensional spectral gating for denoising bioacoustics recordings}},
author = {Julien Boussard and Mélisande Teng and Sulagna Saha and Mario Gallego-Abenza},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.37910},
eprint = {2609.37910},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37910},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - 2-Dimensional spectral gating for denoising bioacoustics recordings
AU - Julien Boussard
AU - Mélisande Teng
AU - Sulagna Saha
AU - Mario Gallego-Abenza
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.37910
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37910
AB - Isolating vocalizations from noise in bioacoustics recordings is a prerequisite to many ecological analyses, including species identification, animal communication understanding, and individual or population-level variability studies. However, when recordings are acquired in open environments, vocalizations, noise, or signal-to-noise ratio can vary widely across individuals, species, environment, and recording conditions, making it hard to develop robust and generalizable methods for ecological analyses. To account for these challenges, noise reduction techniques are used to remove noise before downstream analyses. Popular methods such as Noisereduce rely on spectral gating, which estimates a noise threshold for each frequency channel. We propose a further improvement to Noisereduce, leveraging the fact that most animal sounds have structure across multiple frequencies. We apply our method on bird and marine mammals recordings and show that our extension of Noisereduce leads to improved denoising in both above and under water acoustic recordings, without impacting speed of preprocessing.
ER -