Acoustic sensing in snapping shrimp dominated environments

Snapping shrimp dominate the high frequency soundscape in shallow warm waters. The noises produced by these small creatures are a result of the collapse of cavitation bubbles they produce. During the rapid collapse, the temperatures in the bubble can momentarily reach the surface temperature of the sun, and produce impulsive noise with source levels higher than 190 dB re 1 μPa @ 1m. With millions of snapping shrimp in most warm shallow water environments, the resulting cacophony is heard in the form of a background crackle familiar to many tropical divers. The resulting ambient noise has highly non-Gaussian statistics. What implications does this have on acoustic sensing in these environments? Can signal processing techniques developed with Gaussian noise assumptions be used without significant penalty in these environments? Can these shrimp be used as sources of opportunity for sensing? To begin answering some of these questions, we present a review of some of the research on signal processing in impulsive noise. Snapping shrimp noise is modeled accurately by symmetric α-stable distributions. Optimal signal processing in α-stable noise is often computationally infeasible, but computationally simple near-optimal solutions can be applied with gains up to 5-10 dB. Communicating in environments with snapping shrimp noise has its own challenges. The errors due to the impulsive noise on sub-carriers of a multi-carrier communication system, or the in-phase and quadrature channels of a single carrier system are not independent. If handled inappropriately, forward error correction codes can perform poorly in such systems. However, if the dependence in the errors can be characterized, it can be exploited in the decoding process to get substantial communication performance gains. We show this through an information theoretic analysis of the communication channel with additive symmetric α-stable noise. Finally, we turn to some applications where the snapping shrimp sounds can be used as sources of opportunity. They can serve as “illumination” for ambient noise imaging, where underwater objects can be imaged completely passively. They can also be used as sources for geoacoustic inversion of the surface sediment. We present some results from past experiments to show how sediment sound speed can indeed be inferred by simply listening passively to the cacophony of the shrimp.