Autonomous Detection of Near-Surface Marine Mammals

Technical Abstract (Limit your abstract to 200 words with no classified or proprietary information) Injury and death of marine mammals can be caused by ship strikes and exposure to high level acoustic sources.It is incumbent upon all U.S. mariners to take whatever precautions necessary to avoid such incidents.The current procedure for mitigating these events is human observers watching with binoculars.To tackle this problem more effectively an automated solution is desired.Aret Associates will develop a Multi-sensor Autonomous Marine Mammal Adaptive Locator (MAMMAL) which will use inputs from radar, IR and EO systems.This data will be processed using advanced registration, detection and tracking algorithms to identify marine mammals at ranges of 1000 yards.For this direct to Phase II we will leverage our marine mammal radar tracking experience and our IR/EO fusion experience to develop and demonstrate a prototype system.