Léa Bouffaut

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• Ph.D. in Underwater Acoustics & Signal Processing
• Research Faculty | Principal Investigator at Cornell University

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a promising technology for underwater acoustics, but its instrumental response is still being investigated to enable quantitative measurements. We use fin whale 20 Hz calls to estimate the conversion between DAS-recorded strain and acoustic pressure. Our method is tested across three deployments on varied seafl...

Climate change is impacting the Arctic faster than anywhere else in the world. As a response, ecosystems are rapidly changing. As a result, we can expect rapid shifts in whale migration and habitat use concurrent with changes in human patterns. In this context, responsible management and conservation requires improved monitoring of whale presence a...

Our oceans are critical to the health of our planet and its inhabitants. Increasing pressures on our marine environment are triggering an urgent need for continuous and comprehensive monitoring of the oceans and stressors, including anthropogenic activity. Current ocean observational systems are expensive and have limited temporal and spatial cover...

In a post-industrial whaling world, flagship and charismatic baleen whale species are indicators of the health of our oceans. However, traditional monitoring methods provide spatially and temporally undersampled data to evaluate and mitigate the impacts of increasing climatic and anthropogenic pressures for conservation. Here we present the first c...

Anthropogenic noise in the ocean is one of the many stressors affecting marine biodiversity. Knowing animals and ships locations is key to conservation efforts. Geophony is also of research interest, as T-phases analysis can help to characterize ocean seismicity and measure ocean temperature. However, offshore passive acoustic monitoring remains ch...

Passive acoustic monitoring provides a reliable way to monitor marine mammal populations, but one deployment can yield terabytes of data, creating a bottleneck at the analysis stage. As a solution, supervised Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been extensively used to automatically detect cetacean calls. However, model generalization enablin...

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) converts fibers in existing underwater telecommunication fiber-optic cables into dense listening arrays of strain sensors. Recent advances in DAS interrogating technology enable increasing data quality, spatial coverage, and bandwidth, sparking interest in applied environmental sensing. Initially focused on seismi...

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) leverages an ocean-bottom telecommunication fiber-optic cable into a densely sampled array of strain sensors. We demonstrate DAS applications to passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) through an experiment on a submarine fiber-optic cable in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. We show that DAS can measure many types of sig...

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) leverages an ocean-bottom telecommunication fiber-optic cable into a densely-sampled massive array of strain sensors. We demonstrate DAS applications to Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) through an experiment in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. We show that DAS can measure many types of signals generated by dynamic...

In a post-industrial whaling world, flagship and charismatic baleen whale species are indicators of the health of our oceans. However, traditional monitoring methods provide spatially and temporally undersampled data to evaluate and mitigate the impacts of increasing climatic and anthropogenic pressures for conservation. Here we present the first c...

Release of a dataset of DAS recordings with whales calls is now publicly available and DOI-citable! https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5823343

This preprint is downloadable at https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10507855.1

Léa Bouffaut's talk for the session 01. Acoustic Monitoring of Ocean Environments and Processes: Biology, Ecology, Geophysics and Man-made activities of UACE 2021 on Thursday, 24th June 2021. Recorded presentation available: https://youtu.be/z0i_SCI9BOc A recording of the entire session is available at https://player.vimeo.com/video/559941451 Ab...

The source level (SL) and vocalizing source depth (SD) of individuals from two blue whale (BW) subspecies, an Antarctic blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus intermedia; ABW) and a Madagascar pygmy blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda; MPBW) are estimated from a single bottom-mounted hydrophone in the western Indian Ocean. Stereotyped units (ma...

link to the talk: https://youtu.be/Zj8YL6JqSpo Over the last decade, the opportunistic use of broadband Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) recordings has been extremely beneficial for baleen whales studies as they regularly record their stereotyped calls ([10-40] Hz). Often deployed in remote areas, OBSs offer additional and often unprecedented locati...

Extraction of tonal signals embedded in background noise is a crucial step before classification and separation of low-frequency sounds of baleen whales. This work reports results of comparing five tonal detectors, namely the instantaneous frequency estimator, YIN estimator, harmonic product spectrum, cost-function-based detector, and ridge detecto...

The Western Indian Ocean blue whale dataset can be found here: https://zenodo.org/record/3624145#.Xk5OZy2ZNQI These datasets were annotated to support my Ph.D work Detection and classification in passive acoustic contexts: Application to blue whale low-frequency signals. They are based on recordings from Ocean Bottom Seismometers (RR41 and RR48) d...

The GitHub repository can be found here: https://leabouffaut.github.io/SMF_package/ The SMF package is a package includes all code in Matlab for the use and application of the passive stochastic matched filter to the detection of Antarctic blue whale (ABW) calls. Author: Léa Bouffaut, Ph.D. Personal website Researchgate This work was conducted du...

The GitHub repository can be found here: https://leabouffaut.github.io/tonal_detectors/ This work was conducted during my Ph.D. financed by the french Naval Academy (Institut de Recherche de l’Ecole Navale - Brest, France) and was also developed during my visit to the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology - Cornell...

The analysis of the large volumes of data resulting from continuous and long-term monitoring efforts of blue whales (BWs) benefits from the automated detection of target signals. This thesis investigates the challenging problem of the detection and classification of stereotyped signals in a low-frequency passive acoustic context where (1) signals t...

The analysis of the large volumes of data resulting from continuous and long-term monitoring efforts of blue whales (BWs) benefits from the automated detection of target signals. This thesis investigates the challenging problem of the detection and classification of stereotyped signals in a low-frequency passive acoustic context where (1) signals t...

L'analyse du grand volume de données généré par des enregistrements acoustiques long-terme et continus pour l'étude et le suivi des populations de baleines bleues est largement facilitée par l'extraction des signaux cibles, en particulier lorsqu'ils sont noyés dans divers bruits de fond. La méthode proposée dans ce travail permet d'aller plus loin...

The size of sound archives collected globally by the community to monitor cetaceans, including blue whales, is rapidly increasing. Analyzing these vast amounts of data efficiently requires reliable automated detection algorithms. Typically these algorithms focus on a specific call type produced by a single species. We developed an automatic transcr...

The size of sound archives collected globally by the community to monitor cetaceans, including blue whales, is rapidly increasing. Analyzing these vast amounts of data efficiently requires reliable automated detection algorithms. Typically these algorithms focus on a specific call type produced by a single species. We developed an automatic transcr...

As a first step to Antarctic blue whale (ABW) monitoring using passive acoustics, a method based on the stochastic matched filter (SMF) is proposed. Derived from the matched filter (MF), this filter-based denoising method enhances stochastic signals embedded in an additive colored noise by maximizing its output signal to noise ratio (SNR). These as...

From the acoustic data acquired by the RHUM-RUM (Réunion Hotspot and Upper Mantle Réunion's Unterer Mantel) Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) network between October 2012 and November 2013, this study revealed baleen whale occurrence in the western Indian Ocean (IO). Low-frequency songs from three species (Antarctic Blue Whales, Pygmy Blue Whales and...

De par sa discrétion, la détection passive est un atout majeur pour la surveillance de zones maritimes, notamment dans le cas de détection de plongeurs intrus dans les zones portuaires. Des outils de traitement du signal adaptés au contexte passif sont nécessaires afin de minimiser le temps de réaction des opérateurs, voire même d’automatiser le pr...

More than 30 years after the institution of the moratorium on commercial whaling by the International Whaling Commission, one of the biggest challenges in whale monitoring, e.g. Antarctic Blue Whales (ABW), is assessing populations to evaluate their recovery from persecution by mankind. To do this, passive acoustic monitoring is widely used all aro...

While visual survey of whales requires substantial means for limited areas, passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) offers larger scale coverage for long periods and less costs. It usually provides information about species behavior, e.g. seasonal movements, but tools are needed to detail the individuals' behavior. From Indian Ocean in a mountainous area...

As a first step to Antarctic Blue Whale monitoring, a new method based on a passive application of the Stochastic Matched Filter (SMF) is developed. To perform Z-call detection in noisy environment, improvements on the classical SMF requirements are proposed. The signal’s reference is adjusted, the background noise estimation is reevaluated to avoi...

Due to its inherent discretion, passive detection is a conve- nient way for acoustic monitoring of maritime zone. In a context of harbour protection, one of the stakes is intruders detection e.g. scuba divers. However, the need for instan- taneous reaction opens a field of research to improve the human operators’ detection tools. This article propo...