Marine Mammal Monitoring on Navy Ranges (M3R): A Toolset for Automated Detection, Localization, and Monitoring of Marine Mammals in Open Ocean Environments

Navy sonar has been associated with a number of marine mammal stranding events worldwide. As a result determining the effects of anthropoge nise on marine mammals is currently an active area of research. The developemnt methods to detect and localixe the animals in their native environments is key to advance this reearch and our understanding .This paper presents a collection of algorithms for automated passive acoustic detection, classification and localization of vocalizing marine mammals in open ocean environments. The toool set known as M3R (Marine Mammal Monitoring on Navy Ranges) uses the large fields of wide-bandwidth bottom-mounted hydrophones that are part of the U.S Navy undersea ranges to listen for vocalizing whales. M3R employs time-frequency analysis to passively detect whale vocalizations; It then aligns detections among neighboring hydrophones to determine the difference in times of arrival (TDOA) of each vocalization. Sets of TDOA are then used to determine 2-D or 3-D position points using hyperbolic localization techniques. An M3R system is capable of continuous automated real-time monitoring of over 200 wide-bandwidth hydrophones covering 2,000+ km(2) of open ocean M3R is typically used in a collaborative fashion to localize animals in support of tagging exercises visual surveys and behavioural response experiments.