Modeling and frequency tracking of marine mammal whistle calls

CIVINS === Approved for public release, distribution unlimited === Marine mammal whistle calls present an attractive medium for covert underwater communications. High quality models of the whistle calls are needed in order to synthesize natural-sounding whistles with embedded information. Since the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Severson, Jared
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Published: Cambridge Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10945/4301
Description
Summary:CIVINS === Approved for public release, distribution unlimited === Marine mammal whistle calls present an attractive medium for covert underwater communications. High quality models of the whistle calls are needed in order to synthesize natural-sounding whistles with embedded information. Since the whistle calls are composed of frequency modulated harmonic tones, they are best modeled as a weighted superposition of harmonically related sinusoids. Previous research with bottlenose dolphin whistle calls has produced synthetic whistles that sound too clean for use in a covert communications system. Due to the sensitivity of the human auditory system, watermarking schemes that slightly modify the fundamental frequency contour have good potential for producing natural-sounding whistles embedded with retrievable watermarks. Structured total least squares is used with linear prediction analysis to track the time-varying fundamental frequency and harmonic amplitude contours throughout a whistle call. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the capability to accurately model bottlenose dolphin whistle calls and retrieve embedded information from watermarked synthetic whistle calls.