![]()
INV-16007
Background
Ocean monitoring and detection plays a critical role in observing marine mammal populations continuously in time and space across ocean areas, which is essential for the management of marine ecosystems and accessing anthropogenic impacts.
Additionally, marine mammal monitoring is mandated by the Marine Mammal Protection Act in operations that involve transmissions of acoustic or seismic signals. The current approach uses a hydrophone or an array of hydrophones, which has limitations in its range of detection, accuracy, and ability to differentiate marine mammal groups.
Technology Overview
The proposed technology uses passive acoustic waveguide sensing to instantaneously detect, localize and classify marine mammal vocalizations from diverse species across large areas of ocean. The system consists of both hardware and proprietary software and can also be used for seismic surveying in the oil and gas industry and naval sonar surveillance.
Benefits
- Provides continuous detection across large areas (10K sq. km), an increase of roughly 100x compared to hydrophones
- Enhances signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by a factor of 10x or more, compared to hydrophones, providing high-resolution directional sensing capacity
- Ability to update geographic positioning and tracking in one minute intervals
- Marine mammals from multiple species are simultaneously distinguished and classified by utilizing the unique time-frequency characteristics of their vocalizations
Applications
- Marine mammal monitoring
- Marine seismic and geographical surveys
- Naval sonar surveillance
- Oil/gas exploration
Opportunity
- License
- Partnering
- Research collaboration
