Robust smoothing to improve position estimates of vocalizing marine mammals

The problem of robust smoothing of position estimates provided by passive localization methods is considered. A new robust statistic is introduced, and the smoothing algorithm is represented in the closed form. The proposed technique is based on a priori information regarding the maximum speed of the animal and the typical accuracy provided by the measuring system. The test results demonstrate that the proposed smoother provides a high degree of position estimate accuracy when more than 50% of the initial position estimates are contaminated by outliers.