Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8P 5C2, Canada.
North Coast Cetacean Society, 26 Cottonwood Road, Alert Bay, British Columbia V0N 1A0, Canada.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 Dec;146(6):4672. doi: 10.1121/1.5138125.
Localization and tracking of vocalizing marine mammals are powerful tools for understanding and mitigating the impacts of anthropogenic stressors such as vessel noise on habitat use of cetaceans. A large-aperture hydrophone network has been installed in the Kitimat Fjord System, an ecologically, culturally, and economically valued marine environment in northern British Columbia, Canada. This network consists of four synchronized bottom-mounted hydrophones that permanently record and radio-transmit data to a land-based laboratory. An automated system has been developed which includes routines to localize transient bio-acoustic signals from three or more streaming hydrophones in near real-time. These routines comprise the correlation of hydrophone signals, the construction of a time lag model, and signal localization and error estimation from a spatial likelihood surface. The localization method was tested experimentally and subsequently applied to vocalizations from humpback whales, fin whales, and killer whales. Refractive and reflective sound propagation effects in the confined fjords are assessed using ray tracing propagation models. Automated localization results are compared to ground-truth data and shown to provide good accuracy.
对发声海洋哺乳动物进行定位和跟踪是一种强大的工具，可用于了解和减轻人为压力源（如船只噪音）对鲸鱼栖息地利用的影响。在加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省北部具有生态、文化和经济价值的基蒂马特峡湾系统中，已经安装了一个大孔径水听器网络。该网络由四个同步的底部安装水听器组成，可永久记录并将数据无线传输到陆基实验室。已经开发了一种自动化系统，其中包括用于实时定位来自三个或更多流媒体水听器的瞬态生物声学信号的例程。这些例程包括水听器信号的相关、时滞模型的构建以及来自空间似然面的信号定位和误差估计。该定位方法经过了实验测试，并随后应用于座头鲸、长须鲸和虎鲸的叫声。使用射线追踪传播模型评估了限制在峡湾中的折射和反射声传播效应。将自动定位结果与地面实况数据进行比较，结果表明具有良好的准确性。
