USVSEG: A robust segmentation of rodents’ ultrasonic vocalization

Tachibana, R. O.; Kanno, K.; Okabe, S.; Kobayasi, K. I.; Okanoya, K.

doi:10.1101/572743

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bioRxiv · 10.1101/572743

USVSEG: A robust segmentation of rodents’ ultrasonic vocalization

Tachibana, R. O.·Kanno, K.·Okabe, S.·Kobayasi, K. I.·Okanoya, K.

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Abstract

Rodents ultrasonic vocalization (USV) provides useful information to assess their social behaviors. Despite of previous efforts for classifying subcategories of time-frequency patterns of USV syllables to associate with their functional relevances, detection of vocal elements from continuously recorded data have remained to be not well-optimized. We here propose a novel procedure for detecting USV segments in continuous sound data with background noises which were inevitably contaminated during observation of the social behavior. The proposed procedure utilizes a stable version of spectrogram and additional signal processing for better separation of vocal signals by reducing variation of the background noise. Our procedure also provides a precise time tracking of spectral peaks within each syllable. We showed that this procedure can be applied to a variety of USVs obtained from several rodent species. A performance test with an appropriate parameter set showed performance for detecting USV syllables than conventional methods.

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Tachibana, R. O., Kanno, K., Okabe, S., Kobayasi, K. I., Okanoya, K.. 2019-03-11. USVSEG: A robust segmentation of rodents’ ultrasonic vocalization. https://doi.org/10.1101/572743

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