Abstract
This paper shall demonstrate the performance and opportunities provided by a passive acoustic marine mammal monitoring system (PAM) integrated within seismic cables.
The cetacean detection domain is broad because of the variety of the possible vocalizations and complex, because the actual truth is rarely known. We present two case studies in this document, the automatic detection of humpback whale moans, and the automatic localization of sperm whales clicks trains.
We have chosen the detection of humpback whale’s low frequency moans as this species is regularly detected during seismic surveys. Its detection is due to medium frequency components (>500Hz) of its vocalizations, whereas the frequency range of moans starts at 20Hz [1].
The localization of sperm whales is challenging as sperm whales vocalize while diving hundreds of meters, which makes it difficult to accurately localize in the horizontal plane.
Although Sercel, with the support and commitment of CGG, has accumulated data during more than twenty months aboard several seismic vessels; this paper specifically provides analysis of mammal monitoring offshore Brazil in the Barreirinhas basin aboard the CGG Oceanic Vega in 2016, where the PAM system was operated for validation purpose.