Eric Munday, Biosonics Inc.

Development of Vertical Hydrophone Array Solution for Marine Mammal Tracking

Knowing the location and track of endangered sea mammals has become important as vessel traffic near busy ports increases. Automating the processing of locating them ensures reliable information and more complete coverage.

The icListen HF Smart Hydrophone can be deployed in arrays to collect synchronized multi-channel data used for determining the position and track of sea mammal pods.  By knowing the properties of the unique sounds produced by these animals, their presence can be confirmed through the classification process. This data, if collected in an array, is processed to determine position and track.

This presentation talks about the array used to collect this type of data, and some tests performed to determine the accuracy of acoustic pulse sources. This gives a baseline for the algorithms used in  localizing the sound sources of the animals of interest.  Field tests performed verify sound positioning accuracy using this approach.