Performance Evaluation of Traditional Signal Processing Methods in Localizing Tursiops truncatus Whistles in a Reverberant Aquatic Environment

Abstract Relative to individually distinctive signature whistles , little is known about the “non-signature” calls – particularly the non-signature whistles – of the common Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus . While such calls are suspected to serve social function, tracking their exchange among conspecifics and correlating their usage with non-acoustic behavior has proven challenging, given both their relative scarcity in the dolphin repertoire and their characteristic shared use among dolphins, which precludes the unique identification of callers on the basis of whistle properties alone. Towards the goal of robustly identifying the callers of non-signature whistles (equivalently, attributing non-signature whistles to callers), we present a new, long-term audiovisual monitoring system designed for and tested at the Dolphin Discovery exhibit of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland. In this paper, we confirm the system’s ability to spatially localize impulse-like sounds using traditional signal processing approaches that have already been used to localize dolphin echolocation clicks. We go on to provide the first rigorous experimental evaluation of the component time-difference-of-arrival-(TDOA) extraction methods on whistle-like tonal sounds in a (reverberant) aquatic environment, showing that they are generally not suited to sound localization. Nevertheless, we find that TDOA extraction under these circumstances is performed significantly better using a Generalized Cross-Correlation with Phase Transform (GCC-PHAT) method than a standard circular cross-correlation method, a potentially important result.