Exploring the Thermal Limits of IR-Based Automatic Whale Detection (ETAW)
Abstract
Growing concerns that aquatic noise produced during naval exercises and offshore seismic surveys may be harmful to marine mammals, have led an increasing number of regulating agencies to request mitigation measures when issuing permits for such surveys in their nations EEZ. The most common measure is to implement a marine mammal watch, a team of observers that scans the ships environs for signs of presence of marine mammals to trigger a shutdown of the hydroacoustic source when marine mammals are entering a predefined exclusion zone. Marine mammal observers usually scan the ships environs for whales using binoculars or the naked eye. Sightings mostly rely on spotting a whales blow, which might rise to a height of several meters but is visible for a few seconds only. Hence, in combination with the whales prolonged dives, sighting opportunities are rare, which, in addition to the limited field of view and finite attention span of human observers, renders this method far from optimal, even during fair weather and daytime. During darkness it is not feasible. Our long-term goal is to overcome these difficulties and to develop a reliable, automatic whale detection system for the full range of oceanic environmental conditions (wind, sea surface temperature) and species. To this end, we developed a ship-based thermal imaging system for automated marine mammal detection, consisting of an actively stabilized, spinning IR camera and an algorithm that detects whale blows on the basis of their thermal signature. So far, this technology has been tailored to and tested under cold (SST < 10C) water conditions only, as this is where the technology was expected to perform best. To adapt the technology to warmer environments and to test its performance there is the specific goal of this proposal.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2015
- Accession Number
- AD1013967
Entities
People
- Daniel Paranhos Zitterbart
- Olaf Boebel
Organizations
- Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research