A multi-hypothesis tracker for clicking whales

J Acoust Soc Am. 2015 May;137(5):2552-62. doi: 10.1121/1.4919370.

Abstract

This paper describes a tracker specially designed to track clicking beaked whales using widely spaced bottom-mounted hydrophones, although it can be adapted to different species and sensors. The input to the tracker is a sequence of static localization solutions obtained using time difference of arrival information at widely spaced hydrophones. To effectively handle input localizations with high ambiguity, the tracker is based on multi-hypothesis tracker concepts, so it considers all potential association hypotheses and keeps a large number of potential tracks in memory. The method is demonstrated on actual data and shown to successfully track multiple beaked whales at depth.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Acoustics / instrumentation*
  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Environmental Monitoring / instrumentation*
  • Environmental Monitoring / methods
  • Equipment Design
  • Motion
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Sound
  • Sound Spectrography
  • Species Specificity
  • Time Factors
  • Transducers*
  • Vocalization, Animal / classification*
  • Whales / classification*
  • Whales / physiology*