Detection and classification of right whales in the Bay of Fundy using independent component analysis
Michael A. Linford, Brian R. La Cour · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2003
A novel method of the detection and classification for marine mammals is presented which uses techniques from independent component analysis to solve the blind source separation problem for right whales in the Bay of Fundy. Using the fundamentally non-Gaussian nature of marine mammal vocalizations and data collected on multiple hydrophones, we are able to separate right whale source spectra, up to an unknown scale, from ambient noise. This technique assumes that the array data is a linear combination of the source signals but does not require specific knowledge of the array geometry. A detector/classifier algorithm is demonstrated which compares the estimated source spectra against known right whale vocalizations.