A wave glider-based, towed hydrophone array system for autonomous, real-time, passive acoustic marine mammal monitoring.

An autonomous surface vehicle known as a wave glider, instrumented with a low-power towed hydrophone array and embedded digital signal processor, is demonstrated as a viable low-noise system for the passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammals. Other key design elements include high spatial resolution beamforming on a 32-channel towed hydrophone array, deep array deployment depth, vertical motion isolation, and bandwidth-efficient real-time acoustic data transmission. Using at-sea data collected during a simultaneous deployment of three wave glider-based acoustic detection systems near Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in September 2019, the capability of a low-frequency towed hydrophone array to spatially reject noise and to resolve baleen whale vocalizations from anthropogenic acoustic clutter is demonstrated.

Receiver operating characteristic for a spectrogram correlator-based humpback whale detector-classifier.

This paper presents recent experimental results and a discussion of system enhancements made to the real-time autonomous humpback whale detector-classifier algorithm first presented by Abbot et al. [J. Acoust.

A real-time method for autonomous passive acoustic detection-classification of humpback whales.

This paper describes a method for real-time, autonomous, joint detection-classification of humpback whale vocalizations. The approach adapts the spectrogram correlation method used by Mellinger and Clark [J. Acoust.