Unattended Acoustic Sensor Systems For Source Detection, Classification, and Tracking.

Distributed and decentralized sensing offers a new and promising paradigm for surveillance, reconnaissance, and situation awareness. This paper introduces a new fully decentralized decision-making platform referred to as environmental monitoring station (EMS) for sensor-level detection, classification, and tracking of acoustic airborne sources in national parks. This custom-designed field-programmable gate array-based platform allows for near real-time transient source detection and classification using the 1/3 octave spectral data extracted locally from the streaming acoustic data. Source tracking through successive angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation is also implemented locally on the EMS system using an array of microphones. The general headings of the sources generated using the AoA history and the source labels are transmitted to a park station via two possible wireless links. Field test results are provided to evaluate the performance of the overall system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]