A Spatio-temporal Deep Learning Approach for Underwater Acoustic Signals Classification

Target recognition from underwater acoustic signals is a major challenge in surveillance systems, especially in military and defense fields. Deep learning models are increasingly used for the automatic classification of underwater signals, but many challenges remain due to the complexity of sound navigation and ranging networks, the noise present in the signals, and the difficulty of collecting large amounts of data for efficient training. In this paper, we propose two new architectures for underwater signal classification based on Spatio-temporal modeling. In experiments, evaluations on two real datasets show that the proposed approach achieves a classification accuracy of 98% which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the proposed end-to-end network is considerably faster than MFCC-based networks such as Yamnet and VGGish.