The paper considers the problem of detecting and classifying acoustic signals based on information (entropy) criteria. A number of new information features based on timefrequency distributions are proposed, which include the spectrogram and its upgraded version, the reassigned spectrogram. To confirm and verify the proposed characteristics, modeling on synthetic signals and numerical verification of the solution of the multiclass classification problem based on machine learning methods on real hydroacoustic recordings are carried out. The obtained high classification results (F1 = 0.95) allow us to assert the advantages of using the proposed characteristics.