Film premiere – “Die Sprache der Wale”

Symbolic picture for the article. The link opens the image in a large view. — Northern Resident Killer Whale during the fieldwork expedition 2018/2019 in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada (copyright by Anthro-Media)

April 23, 2020

Due to COVID-19 the television transmitter 3sat changed its broadcast program – update for the announcement from March, 30:

3sat will broadcast the documentary “Die Sprache der Wale” by Volker Barth for the first time on Thursday, 3rd of September 2020, at 20:15 in “Wissen hoch 2”.

Over a period of 3 years, an interdisciplinary research team consisting of marine biologists, computer scientists and psychologists collected communication and behavioral data of different killer whale families in the Canadian Pacific Ocean to investigate a possible connection between communication patterns and their respective behavior. The research team of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, in particular the pattern recognition lab around Andreas Maier and Elmar Nöth, analyzes and processes the large amount of audiovisual data by using different machine learning methods in order to derive a connection between communication and behavior of the animals.

ORCA-SPOT: An Automatic Killer Whale Sound Detection Toolkit Using Deep Learning

Volker Barth’s film “Die Sprache der Wale” shows and accompanies the research team on their expeditions in the Pacific Ocean.