Whale cocktail party: Real-time multiple tracking and signal analyses

This paper provides a real-time passive acoustic method to track multiple vocalizing whales using four or more omni-directional widely-spaced bottom-mounted hydrophones. Since the interest in marine mammals has increased, robust and real-time systems are required. To meet these demands, a real-time tracking algorithm was developed. After non-parametric Teager-Kaiser-Mallat signal filtering, rough Time Delays Of Arrival are calculated, selected and filtered, and used to estimate the positions of whales for a constant, linear or estimated sound speed profile. The complete algorithm is tested on real data from NUWC 1 and AUTEC 2 . Our model is validated by similar results from the US Navy 3 and SOEST 4 University of Hawaii Laboratory in the case of one whale, and by similar results from the Columbia University ROSA 5 Laboratory for the case of multiple whales. At this time, our tracking method is the only one which provides typical speed and depth estimates for multiple vocalizing whales.

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