Echo-Robust and Real-Time 3D Tracking of Marine Mammals Using Their Transient Calls Recorded by Hydrophones Array

Processing marine mammals (MM) signal for 3D tracking has increasing interest for the study of the behavior of endangered species. Practically, real time systems are required, and it has been observed that echoes are very common in underwater signal, and dramatically affect the localization results. Therefore, we develop a robust real-time tracking algorithm, with echo cancellation, processing wide band MM transient signal in time domain, from records of 5 omni-directional widely spaced hydrophones. The complete algorithm is tested on 25 min. of real data from NUWC & AUTEC. The attractive outlines of our method are: it runs 2 times faster than real time, requires small frequency sample data, still estimates similar trajectories than state of the art methods