Discovering Biological Hotspots with a Passively Listening AUV

Abstract

We present a novel system which blends multiple distinct sensing modalities in audio-visual surveys to assist marine biologists in collecting datasets for understanding the ecological relationship of fish and other organisms with their habitats on and around coral reefs. Our system, designed for the CUREE AUV, uses four hydrophones to determine the bearing to biological sound sources through beamforming. These observations are merged in a Bayesian Occupancy Grid to produce a 2D map of the acoustic activity of a coral reef. Simultaneously, the AUV uses unsupervised topic modeling to identify different benthic habitats. Combining these maps allows us to determine the level of acoustic activity within each habitat. We demonstrated the system in field trials on reefs in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where it was able to autonomously discover the favored habitats of snapping shrimp (genus Alpheus).