The 24th student poster program of the conference series was held in Bremen, Germany as a part of OCEANS’09. Once again there were many outstanding posters representing a wide variety of work. The students came from Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe, Canada and the UK and the United States. Fifty nine student poster abstracts were received and twenty students were selected to present their posters. Two students did not show up and one was late in arriving. However eighteen posters were displayed and judged. The posters were located in a good location in the Exhibition Hall. As you entered the hall, the posters immediately caught your attention.
     The Student Poster program and competition has been an integral and important part of the OCEANS conferences since 1989. The program is designed to foster and promote student involvement in technical societies and conferences and to provide a forum for students to interact with marine professionals. The poster program is open to engineering and science graduate and undergraduate students of any tertiary level university or college worldwide. The program is supported by a grant from the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research.
     The Poster program began with a briefing and review of the rules on Tuesday morning. Each student then gave a short description of the poster to the fellow students and judges. Following the plenary session the posters were mounted in their assigned places and the program began.
     The Judging Team met Wednesday afternoon to review the results and select the winning posters. After some deliberation the winning posters were selected as follows:
     1st Place – Thibaut Lurton
     2nd Place – Marcos Sastre and Shyam Kumar Madhusudhana
     3rd Place – Valentin Soulenq, Grant Pusey, and Ismael Aymerich

     The climax of the program came on Wednesday evening at the gala reception in the Old Town Hall. This magnificent room was a fitting way to honor the students for their work and participation in this program. The students assembled in front of the podium and were introduced by Mr. Norman D. Miller, IEEE/OES Student Activities Coordinator. Mr. Miller gave a brief history of the program and then announced the winning posters. Dr. Martina Pätzold in turn gave the award certificate to Dr. Christoph Waldmann and he gave it to the student. At the completion of the awards ceremony all of the students received a round of applause for their work. Many photos were taken and congratulations abounded.
     Abstracts of each of the winning papers are presented below and the full paper of the first place winner is presented after that.

First Place Award
Simulation of the Radar Observation of a Sea Patch Using the TLM Electromagnetic Method – Thibaut Lurton

Thibaut Lurton was born in Versailles, France, in 1983. He graduated from Telecom Bretagne (formerly ENST Bretagne, engineering school in telecommunications) in 2005, obtaining his degree jointly with a MSc in Spacecraft Technology and Satellite Communications at University College London. He is currently in his third year of PhD studies at Telecom Bretagne, working on the radar observation of the sea surface.
Abstract—We propose the simulated rendition of the observation of a variety of small sea patches by radar. These patches include random sea surface of variable state, with possibly the presence of a manufactured, metallic object in its middle. The simulation in itself draws upon two different techniques which are combined: for the free-space propagation, a simple geometrical ray tracing method is used. On the other hand, we rely on a discrete calculation of the propagation of the electromagnetic waves in the vicinity of the sea surface, using the TLM method. Different aspects of this particular electromagnetic method are discussed in this paper. The originality of the approach is the combination of a geometrical calculation with a discrete, exact computation, each of them being devoted to a precise part of the simulation. Further matter in the article extends onto the explanation of some techniques developed for the need of our study, presentation and annotation of some results along with computation times, and overall discussion.

Second Place Awards
Backscattering of Sound from Salinity Fluctuations: Measurements off a Coastal River Estuary – Marcos Sastre

Marcos M. Sastre-Córdova is a Principal Systems Engineer at Raytheon Company Seapower Capability Center in Portsmouth, Rhode Island (USA), where he has worked since 2000. Marcos is involved in the development of future naval capabilities, primarily in the design, integration and test of sonar systems, modeling and simulation of underwater sound propagation, and analysis of at-sea data. He holds degrees in physics (1997) and physical oceanography (2000) from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez and an MBA (2004) from the University of Rhode Island. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a Raytheon Advanced Study Program Scholar.
Abstract—In this work a set of near co-located acoustic intensity observations and environmental measurements is presented which allowed quantification of the source of the acoustic scattering and confirmation of backscattering contributions from salinity microstructure. Observations were made by the T­REMUS Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) in a fresh water plume off a coastal river estuary characterized by strong salinity stratification and intense turbulence. Velocity and density microstructure measurements were used to calculate the expected acoustic backscattering cross-section from salinity fluctuations, which was then compared to near coincident acoustic intensity measurements. Surrogate measures of discrete particle scattering sources (i.e., biologic and mineral) for comparison with measured backscattering were also obtained. A series of regression analyses (single and multi-variable) were performed in an attempt to account for the observed acoustic variability. It was found that most of the variability in the acoustic return signal was explained by a linear combination of the independent variables selected. The results suggest that most of these regressions were dominated by biological and microstructure sources, with a fair amount of cases that were either completely biologically or microstructure dominated. The results led to the conclusion that measurements of salinity backscattering agree with theoretical predictions within experimental error of +/–2dB (on average) for a wide range of turbulence levels, with an observed underestimate of the salinity backscattering of at least 1.5dB under high turbulence conditions. These results strongly support the idea of performing an inversion of the acoustic signal to obtain the salinity variance dissipation rate.

Blue Whale B and D Call Classification Using a Frequency Domain Based Robust Contour Extractor – Shyam Kumar Mahusudhana

Shyam Kumar Madhusudhana, 26, graduated with a Masters degree from San Diego State University (SDSU) in May 2009. After obtaining his Bachelors of Engineering degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Visveswaraya Technological University, Belgaum, India, he moved to San Diego in 2005 to pursue higher education with emphasis on research. His research interests are in the field of statistical pattern recognition as applied to acoustic signals. His Masters thesis involved development of a computer based automatic classifier for recognizing blue whale B and D calls in long term underwater acoustic recordings. He has worked with Dr. Marie Roch (Associate Prof., SDSU) and researchers from Dr. John Hildebrand’s whale acoustics group, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), for over three years. He is presently employed at LumenVox LLC, an Automatic Speech Recognition solutions provider. He is looking forward to begin a PhD program and continues to work with Dr. Marie Roch and other researchers at SIO.
Abstract—Passive acoustic monitoring of blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) has been used to gain insight into their presence and behavior. Many of their calls have been shown to be detectable through spectrogram correlation due to the low variation in these stereotyped calls. In this work, we describe rule based classifiers for tonal B and D calls using the pitch/frequency contour information obtained from a contour extractor. B calls can be detected by spectrogram correlation, but the D calls are highly variable and are therefore difficult to detect using spectrogram kernel methods. Experiments on four hours of evaluation data from different field seasons show that 91.3% of B calls and 85.8% of D calls were correctly retrieved. For both types of calls, less than 2% of the retrieved calls were false positives.

Third Place Awards
A Voice Recognition System for a Submarine Piloting – Valentin Soulenq

Valentin Soulenq is a 21 year old French student. After graduating from high school, he studied at the University Paul Cezanne in Marseille (France) in dual education with the company “Société Marseillaise du Tunnel Prado-Carénage” (SMTPC, France) where he worked in the maintenance department as an electronic technician. After two years of experience, he enrolled in a French Engineering School, the “Institut Supérieur de l’Electronique et du Numérique” (ISEN-Toulon, France) to deepen his knowledge in telecommunications and signal processing. He participated in the student poster competition within the scope of a school project, throughout the second year of the engineering cycle.
Abstract—Nowadays, many voice recognition systems are used in our daily live. In most cases, the transmission canal is the air and they integrate some microphones. The purpose of this study is to develop such a system able to recognize predefined words under water. To identify those commands sent after their propagation in shallow water (use of the ray tracing theory to simulate the propagation in shallow water), we suggest to use a wedding between the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm and a multi-resolution analysis algorithm: the Mallat algorithm. To be a real-time algorithm, we propose an implementation in a 32-bit microcontroller, coupled to electronic chains to treat signals exiting out the sensor.

Analysis of Acoustic Modem Performance for Long
Range Horizontal Data Transmission – Grant Pusey

Abstract—As offshore oil and gas extraction progresses towards deeper waters and more rugged terrain, a real time method of transferring monitoring data to shore without the use of sea surface infrastructure is needed. This study investigates the horizontal performance of acoustic communication to better determine its suitability for relaying data directly to land based stations. Modelling of both deep and shallow underwater acoustic propagation was performed using the ray tracing model, Bellhop. This determined that the position of the modems is important to ensure optimum signal to noise ratio due to the refraction throughout the medium. In shallow water, multipath effects including selective fading and inter-symbol interference become the dominant source of problems.

Fast Phytoplankton Classification from Fluorescence Spectra: Comparison Between PSVM and SOM –
Ismael Aymerich

Abstract—Evaluation of phytoplankton communities is an important task in the characterization of marine environments. Fluorescence spectroscopy is a powerful technique usually used for this goal. This study presents a comparison between two different techniques for fast phytoplankton discrimination: Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) and Potential Support Vector Machines (P-SVM), evaluating its capability to achieve phytoplankton classification from its fluorescence spectra. Several cultures representing different algae groups were grown under the same conditions and their emission fluorescence spectra were measured every day. Finally, the classification results obtained from both techniques, SOM and P-SVM, are presented. In the case of using emission fluorescence spectra, the results show that we are able to reduce the acquisition time required for some of the existing techniques, obtaining encouraging classification performance.

Roster of All Student Posters
Mohamed Abdel-Salam, Alexandria University, “Designing high speed monohull small crafts (HSMSC) using neural networks guided CFD based optimization”

Ismael Aymerich, University of Marine Technology (UTM-CSIC) Spain, “Fast phytoplankton classification from fluorescence spectra: comparison between PSVM and SOM”

Hermann Bertram, Bremen University, MARUM, “Developing and IDE interface for the SNAP module”

Adrian Bodenmann, The University of Tokyo, “Visual Mapping of Internal Pipe Walls using Sparse Features for Application on board Autonomous Underwater Vehicles”

Marcel Farre’, University of Bremen, MARUM, “Sensor Network based on IEEE 1451 for ocean sensors”

Yanzhe Fu, Jacobs University, Bremen, “Forward modeling of paleo heat flow: a case study of Kristin Field, Mid-Norwegian continental shelf”

Sabine Graf, University of Bath, “Acoustic Modeling of ­Dolphin Sound Reception and Implications for Biosonar Design”

Mathew Johnson-Roberson, University of Sydney, “Fast phytoplankton classification from fluorescence spectra: comparison between PSVM and SOM”

Tanio Lado, University of Rhode Island, “Offshore mussel aquaculture: new or just renewed?”

Thibaut Lurton, Telecom Bretagne, France, “Simulation of the Radar Observations of a Sea Patch using the TLM Electromagnetic Methods”

Shyam Kumar Madhusudhana, San Diego State University, “Blue Whale B and D Call Classification Using a Frequency Domain Based Robust Contour Extractor”

Grant Pusey, Curtin University of Technology, Australia, “Analysis of acoustic modem performance for long range horizontal data transmission”

David Sarria, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), ­SARTI Spain, “Control and acquisition system design for an Expandable Seafloor Observatory (OBSEA)”

Marcos Sastre, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, “Backscattering of Sound from Salinity Fluctuations: Measurements off a Coastal River Estuary”

Saad Sharaf, Alexandria University, “WCLES: An innovative environmental friendly combustionless engine for marine applications based on low-current electrolysis technology”

Midori Shimizu, Kobe University, “Correction Method for Buoy Oscillation by Three GPS Receivers”

Valentin Soulenq, ISEN, Toulon, France, “A voice recognition system for a submarine piloting”

Yusuke Yamane, Kobe University, “Improvement for Detection Distance of Sonar by Flat Acoustic Reflector”

Are You Up To a Challenge?

Editor’s Note: The piece below is reprinted from a book titled More Maritime Melodies published in 1894 by the Commercial Publishing Company in San Francisco. I offer this as a challenge to all of you who love the sea; write something poetic about the sea or your work and send it to me at j.gant@ieee.org. Show me what you are made of.

     The following poem was written by the late Colonel E.D. Baker, the celebrated orator and soldier, under interesting circumstances. Many years ago, he was walking home from church one Sunday with a lady when she complained of the buffeting of the winds for which San Francisco was, and still is, famed. She declared the wind to be the most unmannerly and prosaic thing in nature, and at his remonstrance challenged him to say anything poetic of it. The next morning she received the following verses and note:

TO THE OCEAN WIND
E.D. Baker

SEAWARD the mists lie dense and deep,
And wild the tempests blow,
The sea-gull circles round the steep,
And waves are white below.
Speed – speed – ye winds, your viewless flights,
But landward as ye roam
Bear on your rustling wings to-night
Health to her distant home.

Ye come from Isles of spice and bloom,
Where palm tree line the strand,
Yet mingling with your rich perfume
Airs from a colder land.
Loud tho’ ye rage, and wild ye roar,
Sweet is your breath, and free,
And full of blessings to the shore
The storm that sweeps the sea.

But if those eddying blasts have power
A wish or word to bear,
Seek ere ye sleep, my loved one’s bower
And leave my greeting there.
Whisper it gently in her ear
When stars are in the sky,
And kiss away the starting tear
When none but you are nigh.

Tell her I love her – in that word
Soul, heart, thought, impulse thrill,
Tell her that every vow she heard
I’ve fondly kept, and will.
Tell her – but, no, I soon shall see
The “love light” in her eye.
Till then my only word shall be
Love – blessing – and good-bye.

Mr. Baker presents his respectful compliments to Mrs. ___ and sends the trifle enclosed as a proof (of which said proof she of all persons needs least) that a lady’s commands impel the commonest imagination into the forms of poetry even when the spirit is most wanting.