AI model 'hears' Bryde's whale calls in seismic data from South China Sea

AI model 'hears' Bryde's whale calls in seismic data from South China Sea

Researchers have repurposed an AI model designed for visual identification tasks to detect Bryde's whale calls contained within seismic data collected in the South China Sea. The detection system precisely identified calls more than 96% of the time and even identified some call events that were missed when the data were examined by hand, according to the study published in Seismological Research Letters.

AI Model “Hears” Whale Calls in Seismic Data | Seismological Society of America

10 June 2026—Researchers repurposed an AI model designed for visual identification tasks to detect Bryde’s whale calls contained with seismic data collected in the South China Sea. A whale call can be visualized as a spectrogram, a “snapshot of sound” that shows how the frequencies of the sound signal change over time. Without being trained previously on any whale call spectrograms, the foundation Segment Anything Model (SAM) used by Zhuo Xiao o…