A Self-Supervised Approach for Minimal-Annotation Hydroacoustic Data Exploration

Abstract: Passive hydroacoustic monitoring often generates large volumes of continuous recordings that are only partially exploited due to the cost of manual annotation. Supervised detection methods perform well but require large labeled datasets, seldom available for rare signals or understudied environments. This work proposes a self-supervised exploration pipeline to address this limitation in low-frequency settings. A Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) is pre-trained on a reconstruction pretext task, then used to extract patch-level representations from spectrograms. Within each spectrogram, adjacent informative patches are aggregated into event-level embeddings, enabling the disentanglement of overlapping events. These embeddings are then clustered at the dataset scale using the dimension reduction algorithm UMAP and the clustering algorithm HDBSCAN to identify hydroacoustic patterns. The pipeline was applied to a multi-year hydroacoustic dataset collected near Mayotte Island, Indian Ocean, containing marine mammal vocalizations, seismo-volcanic signals, and anthropogenic noise. The 317 clusters were manually mapped to 15 hydroacoustic classes or noise in less than one hour. The method was evaluated in two ways. Quantitatively, when used as a classifier, it achieved performance comparable to two existing detectors. Qualitatively, it recovered known seasonal patterns of marine mammal acoustic activity. It also identified patterns of previously unstudied signals, thereby demonstrating its practical value.