A QUANTITATIVE MEASURE OF SIMILARITY FOR TURSIOPS-TRUNCATUS SIGNATUREWHISTLES

Bottlenose dolphins (tursiops truncatus) produce individually distinct ive narrow-band ''signature whistles.'' These whistles may be differen tiated by the structure of their frequency contours. An algorithm is p resented for extracting frequency contours from whistles and comparing two such contours. This algorithm performs nonuniform time dilation t o align the contours and provides a quantitative distance measure betw een the contours. Two recognition experiments using the algorithm on t hree dolphin whistles from each of five individuals classified 15 out of 15 single-loop whistles correctly, and 14 out of 15 central loops f or multiple-loop whistles correctly.