North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) Detection & Localization in the Bay of Fundy using Widely Spaced, Bottom Mounted Sensors

A data set consisting of North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena gladalis) vocalizations were provided as part of the 2003 International Workshop on Detection and Localization of Marine Mammals using Passive Acoustics in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These vocalizations were processed using a set of detection and localization algorithms developed as part of the Marine Mammal Monitoring on Navy Ranges (M3R) program. Localization is performed using hyperbolic multilateration on Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) data from a two stage FFT based energy detector. Binary FFTs are computed from the raw time series by thresholding the FFT using a time average in each bin as the threshold criteria. Clicks are detected by comparing the total number of bins above threshold to a secondary threshold. Detected clicks are split out of the data stream and the rest of the data is aligned using a spectrogram cross-correlation. Details of the marine mammal monitoring algorithms will be presented as well as results from the data set