A system for tracking frequency‐modulated bowhead whale calls on vector sensors in the presence of seismic exploration activity.

A group of software tools has been developed for automated detection and localization of bowhead whale sounds with arbitrary frequency‐modulated tones. The software is a mixture of JAVA, UNIX C‐shell scripts, and MATLAB components, and consists of six sequential components: an incoherent spectral band event detector that yields time and bearings of transient events; an interval estimator to remove weak airgun signals; a feature extractor that processes an input spectrogram to yield a 23‐element feature vector; two feed‐forward neural network classifiers that sequentially winnow non‐biologic signals and pinnipeds; a linking procedure to combine signals detected on sensors several kilometers apart; and a localization method that uses a maximum‐likelihood procedure for estimating a position from a series of bearings. The software has been applied to data collected between 2007 and 2009 from at least 35 vector sensor autonomous recorders deployed over a 280‐km swath in the Beaufort Sea. The largest dataset (2...