Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2023 May 1;153(5):2690. doi: 10.1121/10.0017888.
Localization and tracking of marine animals can reveal key insights into their behaviors underwater that would otherwise remain unexplored. A promising nonintrusive approach to obtaining location information of marine animals is to process their bioacoustic signals, which are passively recorded using multiple hydrophones. In this paper, a data processing chain that automatically detects and tracks multiple odontocetes (toothed whales) in three dimensions (3-D) from their echolocation clicks recorded with volumetric hydrophone arrays is proposed. First, the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements are extracted with a generalized cross-correlation that whitens the received acoustic signals based on the instrument noise statistics. Subsequently, odontocetes are tracked in the TDOA domain using a graph-based multi-target tracking (MTT) method to reject false TDOA measurements and close gaps of missed detections. The resulting TDOA estimates are then used by another graph-based MTT stage that estimates odontocete tracks in 3-D. The tracking capability of the proposed data processing chain is demonstrated on real acoustic data provided by two volumetric hydrophone arrays that recorded echolocation clicks from Cuvier's beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris). Simulation results show that the presented MTT method using 3-D can outperform an existing approach that relies on manual annotation.
海洋动物的定位和跟踪可以揭示它们在水下行为的关键见解，否则这些行为将无法被探索。一种获取海洋动物位置信息的非侵入性方法是处理它们的生物声信号，这些信号是使用多个水听器被动记录的。在本文中，提出了一种数据处理链，该处理链可以从容积水听器阵列记录的回声定位点击中自动检测和跟踪多个齿鲸（齿鲸）的三维（3-D）位置。首先，使用广义互相关提取到达时间差（TDOA）测量值，该互相关基于仪器噪声统计对接收的声信号进行白化。随后，使用基于图的多目标跟踪（MTT）方法在 TDOA 域中跟踪齿鲸，以拒绝虚假的 TDOA 测量值并弥合漏检的差距。所得的 TDOA 估计值然后由另一个基于图的 MTT 阶段使用，该阶段估计 3-D 中的齿鲸轨迹。所提出的数据处理链的跟踪能力在由两个容积水听器阵列提供的真实声数据上得到了验证，该阵列记录了 Cuvier 喙鲸（Ziphius cavirostris）的回声定位点击。仿真结果表明，使用 3-D 的所提出的 MTT 方法可以优于依赖于手动注释的现有方法。
