Signal Processing Applied to the Dolphin-Based Sonar System

摘要

The bottlenose dolphin has evolved a unique system of biosonar, or echolocation, that allows it to exploit a visually limited littoral niche. The effectiveness of dolphin echolocation at finding and identifying submerged objects is unsurpassed by man-made hardware systems built for similar tasks. It has become a model system from which to draw hardware and signal processing design concepts and is the basis for the development of biomimetic mine-hunting systems of the shallow water (SW) and very shallow water (VSW) zones. The Dolphin Based Sonar (DBS) system is a proof-of-concept sonar system designed for operations in the SW/VSW environments that incorporates characteristics of dolphin sonar transmission and structural elements of dolphin auditory anatomy. Specifically, the system is designed to reproduce dolphin signal types and source levels and to match the animal's transmission and reception beam patterns, directivity indices, receive sensitivity, and auditory filtering capabilities.