Automated Acoustic Monitoring of Birdstrike Hazards

"Bird strikes and ingestion of birds into engines pose serious threats to aircraft during takeoff and landing operations at many air bases. AAC and Cornell propose to mitigate these threats by developing an acoustic bird monitoring system that provides bothreal-time snapshots and historical summaries of bird flight activity. This system would utilize a low cost, high gain array in association with acoustic Detection, Classification, and Localization (DCL) techniques designed to monitor bird vocalizations inpotentially noisy environments. The distribution (map coordinates and altitude) and body masses of birds would be would be measured, and predictive models would be developed that relate these data to diurnal, seasonal, and meteorological factors. Alertswill be generated to help aircraft avoid problematic areas that are known or predicted to contain a critical mass of birds. This process will be achieved with a modest number of sensors and sensor sites, and must provide a high probability of detectionwhile generating a very small number of false alarms. Acoustic DCL of birds at useful distances will be facilitated by the use of a multi-element Sparsely Populated Volumetric Array (SPVA). The SPVA uses interferometric processing to provide spatial gain,source localization, and cancellation of interfering sources. Underwater SPVA arrays are currently being deployed on Navy platforms for use in undersea warfare and marine mammal detection applications. Each SPVA system provides an accurate line of bearing.The intersection of lines of bearing from two or more SPVA systems can be used to map the bird's location in map coordinates and altitude. SPVA's can adaptively cancel high intensity noise sources, such as nearby aircraft or ground equipment, which mightotherwise mask the bird signals of interest. Outputs of the SPVA will be fed to a two sets of detectors that will estimate signal parameters for several distinct classes of detected bird vocalizations and will identify manmade airport noises, includingthose from engines, spinning propellers