Automated approach for source location in shallow waters

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated method for localizing sources and estimating medium parameters in shallow waters using a single hydrophone, combining modal separation, spectrogram analysis, and penalized minimization, validated on real data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel fully automated approach integrating modal separation, spectrogram analysis, and optimization for source localization in shallow waters.

Findings

Effective source localization demonstrated on real whale and combustive sounds.

Robust modal separation and travel time recovery methods developed.

Method outperforms existing techniques in shallow water scenarios.

Abstract

This paper proposes a fully automated method for recovering the location of a source and medium parameters in shallow waters. The scenario involves an unknown source emitting low-frequency sound waves in a shallow water environment, and a single hydrophone recording the signal. Firstly, theoretical tools are introduced to understand the robustness of the warping method and to propose and analyze an automated way to separate the modal components of the recorded signal. Secondly, using the spectrogram of each modal component, the paper investigates the best way to recover the modal travel times and provides stability estimates. Finally, a penalized minimization algorithm is presented to recover estimates of the source location and medium parameters. The proposed method is tested on experimental data of right whale gunshot and combustive sound sources, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.