Jay Kirsch
Chesapeake Biol. Lab., 1 Williams St., Solomons, MD 20688
The oceanographic community has seen a sharp increase in the application of underwater acoustics to biological studies. While the emphasis has been on sensor development, only a few signal processing systems have been designed to handle the large amounts of data being generated. Moreover, these systems lag in speed, do not adhere to standards, and center around single frequencies. Future applications of bioacoustics will be limited by the ability to comprehend data being generated. A UNIX workstation-based multifrequency acoustic visualization and information retrieval (MAVAIR) system has recently been designed which is capable of acquiring, analyzing, integrating, and displaying multifrequency data. This integrated post-processing system includes an innovative signal acquisition scheme via DSP hardware, standard bioacoustical software algorithms, and flowgram-based interactive visualization of all parameters. The MAVAIR system should greatly shorten the bioacoustical post-processing task while being more universal and yet simple to use. Work to develop MAVAIR has enabled us to extract more biological information from the acoustical data. Examples of high-resolution fish scattering obtained from the prototype system will be illustrated.