Analysing marine acoustic data

and source attribution

Alistair Forbes, Peter Harris, Dale Partridge, Stephen Robinson and Lian Wang
National Physical Laboratory, Hampton Road, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 0LW, UK

Overview
The EUs Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008/56/EC) requires nations to monitor marine environmental
acoustic noise in order to estimate Good Environmental Status. In particular, the UK has to evaluate trends
in man-made noise (ships, offshore wind farm construction and operation, oil platforms, etc.) in the English
Channel and North Sea.
A network of hydrophones (figure 1) can be used to measure the marine noise at a range of frequencies,
resulting in a large amount of temporal data at a handful of known spatial locations. However, the ultimate
requirement is to be able to estimate the noise (and its associated uncertainty) at any location in the region
of interest.
If the location and sound output power of every source were known, then sound propagation models
can be used to estimate the noise at any location. The location of sources such as ships may well be
known (figure 2), and although the propagation models often involve approximations in order to be more
computationally efficient, they still provide a reasonable prediction of a regional noise map (figure 3).
While large ships are required to carry transponders
that provide their location, speed and direction,
the sound output power, primarily from the
propellers, is only an estimate. Nevertheless,
in conjunction with the propagation models
a prior noise map can be produced. However
there are many sources such as smaller
ships, oil rigs or out of region sources that all
contribute to the total noise which are not
taken into consideration when constructing
this prior knowledge.
It is clear that better use of both the
measurements from the hydrophone network
and the prior knowledge is required in order to
understand the sound levels in UK waters.

Figure1: Underwater noise monitoring system

Figure 2: Ship traffic density from AIS transponders

Finding Unknown Sources

Dynamical Systems

One approach being implemented is to find the approximate locations and levels of all
the sources using compressed sensing techniques. By dividing the simulated region of
interest into a grid where each point is a potential source of noise, the problem reduces to
minimising the L1 norm of the source levels:
subject to the following:

min||S||L

|| y f (S)|| + || A(S S0)||

2
L2

measurements

Figure 3: Comparison between model predictions from a sound propagation

model and measurements

2
L2

prior ship noise

i.e. the norm of the difference between the measurements and the sources mapped to
measurement locations (using a propagation model), as well as the norm of the difference
between the sources and any prior knowledge of noise level (e.g. from ship transponders),
being less than some tolerance.

The dynamic nature of the problem lends itself to learning

algorithms, as a simple simulation can show. If a GPS ship
passes close to a hydrophone, a good estimate of the
source strength for that ship can be made. Each ship in
an ensemble of GPS-tracked ships on sufficiently random
paths will eventually pass close enough to a hydrophone
to enable an improvement in the estimate of its source
strength. Figure 5, top, shows the prior estimate of source
strength along with a 2-standard deviation uncertainty bar
(blue) for 20 ships, along with the estimates after 1 time
epoch (red). The bottom of the figure shows the estimates
and uncertainty bars after 5 (blue) and 20 epochs, at which
time all strengths have been estimated.

Figure 5. Uncertainty levels after varying numbers of learning epochs.

Figure 4: Target noise map, starting prior and reconstructed map.

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Queens Printer and Controller of HMSO, 2014.

11149/1214

Early attempts at constructing the noise map at a single time instant indicate that such an
approach is promising, as shown in figure 4.