No one in the military, oil exploration or conservation sectors can deny man's impact on marine wildlife. Underwater noise from active sonars, air guns and vessels all can affect the feeding, migration, and communication patterns of marine mammals.

But what if we could detect the presence of wildlife in real time, unhindered by dark, fog, or rough sea conditions? Gaining early warning of the presence of marine mammals means man and wildlife can go about their business - side-by-side and undisturbed.

Marine mammals are tricky animals to spot at sea, especially when underwater. To overcome this Kaon have developed, jointly with QinetiQ, the revolutionary new Marine Mammal Acoustic Detector software (MMAD) so that locating whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals couldn't be easier. MMAD is the first system of its kind to automate the detection of a wide variety of marine mammals through signal processing techniques. It takes away the guesswork by continuously listening to the sounds of the ocean and raising the alarm at the first indication of any nearby marine mammals.

Marine mammals communicate using a variety of whistles, creaks, chirps and clicks, in the frequency range from 15Hz to 150kHz. MMAD distinguishes these sounds from false alarms such as engine noises, echo sounders, snapping shrimp, propeller cavitations, active sonar, air guns and other sea life, as well as classifying the species type that's present.

The idea is that MMAD alerts you when there are animals around, while you get on with your business. It performs in poor visibility or at night, and has extremely low false alarm rates, so it's a useful labour saving device.

MMAD detects a wide variety of marine mammals, from the largest species such as the blue and fin whale, to the smaller species including the orca, dolphin, walrus and grey seal.

Using spectral mapping techniques and image processing, MMAD can detect species across the whole band in real time. The software is scalable to target the processing towards groups of mammals depending upon the user's interests and sensor availability.

The user is alerted either visually and or audibly when the system confidence threshold is exceeded and a detection is made.

MMAD software can be installed and operated on a standard PC or workstation and is available for several operating systems, including Linux and Windows. The system uses a sound card input, provides waterfall displays and automatically records data when mammals are present. The system will also analyse pre-recorded WAV files for laboratory based analysis and screening work.

System requirements: PC with a minimum 1.7GHz Pentium processor or equivalent and 256Mb memory.

Custom front end interfaces to a variety of sonar sensors e.g. towed arrays, hull-mounted arrays and sonobuoys have been developed. These provide enhanced features such as bearing estimates. In addition, custom backend interfaces such as a network output for remote triggering of external equipment can be provided. Bespoke interfaces can be engineered to order.

The various species detected by MMAD can be divided into three categories:

Altos and Sopranos (1kHz-150kHz)
Almost exclusively used by odontocetes or toothed whales such as the dolphin, porpoise, orca and sperm whale.

Tenors (100Hz-1500Hz)
Many baleen whales and vocalising pinnipeds such as humpback and minke whales, seals and walrus fall into this category, but the sound structures of their vocalisations vary enormously between species.

Basses (Below 150Hz)
Blue, fin and right whales vocalise down to subsonic frequencies. MMAD utilises a specialist processing chain to detect these species.

Marine Mammal Acoustic Detector (MMAD) (329 Kb)