Chesapeake Times, Vol 14 | July 2023 Over the past few years, we have spent considerable development time on addressing the needs of our sub bottom processor geos. We have made great improvements to the available tools and workflow. We have time and time again had to battle with how to make sure that all of the processing steps done inside of the program can be translated out to .SEGY format. Despite being 50 years old, this file format somewhat unfortunately remains the industry standard for seismic. In this months battle we had a customer reach out to our support …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 14 | July 2023 Empirical Gain Normalization (EGN) The EGN algorithm is a black-box statistical approach to normalizing the backscatter intensity of mapping sonars. It is black-box, because the algorithm works with the observed amplitude values exclusively and makes limited assumptions about internal mechanics of the sonar system. It is statistical, because the correction tables are built empirically. This allows the algorithm to adapt to a wide range of sonar designs and configurations. EGN has been available in SonarWiz since 2007. Originally, EGN was used for sidescan only, when SonarWiz added the bathymetry module, CTI wrote a …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 14 | July 2023 Recently the question came up, “What is the best height to tow my Side Scan Sonar off of the bottom?”  The general answer is the altitude should be 10% to 20% of the slant range.  While this is a good rule of thumb, or general rule to follow, where does it come from? First, let us go over the reasons for adjusting the height of the towfish: On the way to answering this we should take a look at a typical Side Scan Sonar beam pattern shown in the above illustration.   This …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 14 | July 2023 In the latest release of SonarWiz, we added a new way of real time target marking. Called the “Waypoint Contact”, it is a single check box to enable this function. The hardest part was to decide where to place this user command option, without adding more dialog boxes and buttons to SonarWiz. (For now), we added the option in the Motion Sensor set up, as the serial I/O structure was already inplace. The string sent to SonarWiz has some basic client specific structure. However, it has been designed to handle a variety of …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 14 | July 2023 For a couple years now, SonarWiz has been shipping with a little command-line utility called CsfCalc.exe. It hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but it can be pretty handy for some purposes. We’ve mainly used it as a repair tool for files having some bad data in them; this allows for us to provide a script or instructions to repair files without a customer having to upload a large project. It can also be used to extract columns of computed (per-record) data from CSF files, for further inspection/manipulation within a spreadsheet, or perhaps …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 13 | April 2023 In the upcoming version of SonarWiz, 7.11.0, we’ve made a number of additional improvements to SonarWiz’s realtime and recording behavior and setup.  Much of this involves moving options from not-obvious locations to a centralized location, though a few new features deserve mention as well. On the general realtime page of the application preferences window, options can now be set for various non-recording aspects of realtime setups.  Some of these were moved from other preferences pages.  These include drawing options for navigation plotting and screen centering, alarms for disk space and off-course navigation, and …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 13 | April 2023 As one of the support technicians here at CTI I get the unique opportunity to engage with processors daily with training and support questions. Even in my short time in this industry it has been remarkable to see the ballooning of project sizes, where a few years ago a “large” sidescan project was north of 50GB we are now having customers reach out to us for recommendations on managing terabytes of data. We have begun work on adjusting the structure of the SonarWiz project on our end to better suite this new world …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 13 | April 2023 One of the signature features of the SonarWiz 7.10 series is the upgraded geodetic library. The new geodetic engine adds support for hundreds of datum and datum transformations that previous versions of SonarWiz could not support. However, a major limitation of the current SonarWiz design, and a vestige of our old geodetic engine, is that all data is converted to WGS-84 (EPSG:4326) before storage and then forward projected into the project datum before display or export. In other words, all datum transformations in current and earlier versions of SonarWiz force a pivot through …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 13 | April 2023 In the next release of SonarWiz, the addition of saving and highlighting bathymetry sounding points – as flagged and golden soundings was added. We took the concept of a Golden Sounding and enhanced it to be Golden areas, providing more flexibility and options for the user. In SonarWiz, editing bathymetry soundings can be done in the map view or in the bathy editors. The selection of the flagged soundings follows suit and can be done in any of the editing views. Using a shipwreck as an example, the user wants to preserve the …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 13 | April 2023 Often I am reminded that SonarWiz is not just a single simple software application.  It is a large collection of useful tools for manipulating sonar and other types of data.   It features many common tools used for processing sonar data so it can be further analyzed and finally reformatted and saved to a large number of formats.  SonarWiz has tools for processing navigation data, side scan sonar data, sub-bottom sonar data, single and multi-beam bathymetric data, LIDAR data, magnetometer data, etc..  In addition to all of the tools available for processing the …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 12 | Jan 2023 Happy New Year! It is 2023 and here at CTI we are planning some interesting changes to SonarWiz to get more done with less mouse clicks. First, let’s go over what SonarWiz currently offers. We added automatic processing of side scan sonar data in SonarWiz V7.4. The auto processing in this version added the ability to perform bottom tracking, EGN gain processing, and individual GeoTIFF export when a side scan sonar file was imported into SonarWiz. All of these actions were performed without user intervention. If you are not familiar with auto processing …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 12 | Oct 2023 Although the SEGY file format is getting closer to celebrating its 50th birthday, originally developed in the mid-70s, our industry still considers these the standard for storing sub-bottom profiler data. We have come a long way from its original specifications for magnetic tapes and SonarWiz has required multiple updates over the years to customize the exports coming out of the program.  With the recent introduction of Topographic corrections and tidal corrections in the 7.09 release, we also needed to give a face lift to the CSF to SEGY export dialog as previous versions …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 12 | Jan 2023 Next month, I am presenting a talk entitled “Automated ways to distinguish areas of viable targets against a uniform seabed”. It is still a work in progress, but I wanted to share a few of the techniques and results. Note that all the tools used for this project are in SonarWiz, and we’re just using them in a slightly different way. The idea of the project came from an AUV mission but the approach here can be applied to any survey operation. From a typical sidescan sonar, the data creates a mosaic of …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 12 | Jan 2023 In SonarWiz 7.10.02, we are releasing a large update to the SonarWiz Magnetometer module. The goal of the update is to better integrate the magnetometer module with the rest of the program and to add missing utility functions that were previously only available for sonar files. The largest change to the user interface is the addition of Magnetometer Drawing Modes. Drawing modes in SonarWiz are found on the View Menu and they give the user control over how a dataset is displayed in the Map Window. Previously, the user had limited control over …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 12 | Jan 2023 In the upcoming release of version 7.10.2, we’ve added some additional capabilities for realtime monitoring. The sensor graph window, used to show a graph with a brief history of a sensor value, has been expanded to be able to graph more than one value of interest at a time: To add or remove graphs, click on the gear icon near the top left of the dockable sensor graph pane. In addition, note the expanded list of values that can be graphed; most of the same numeric values that are available in the system …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 11 | Oct 2022 Chesapeake Technology offers variety of products to collect and record real-time data from sonar/mapping devices. “Servers,” as we call them, act as a bridge between a running instance of SonarWiz and the hardware or software interface of the sonar device. See the SonarWiz download page (https://chesapeaketech.com/download-sonarwiz/) for a list of currently-supported devices. In an upcoming release, Chesapeake will include support for a new server, interfacing with the EdgeTech eBOSS system. eBOSS (BOSS is “Buried Object Scanning Sonar”) is a 3D SAS sub-bottom profiler providing sub-surface volumetric imagery. SAS (Synthetic Aperture Sonar) is a …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 11 | Oct 2022 In older versions of SonarWiz, the Coverage Report was used to create an image file of the percentages of coverage for a sidescan survey. The tool also could include data being removed from the far range or nadir data and would result in all the coverage statistics needed. Unfortunately, as surveys are getting larger the code and method in which this report is using got slower and slower to the point where we had a large outreach of customer complaints. This old report was pulled out of the program as it did more …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 11 | Oct 2022 Working with our clients, I have come across many uses for the software. Recently, it was used for a project offshore Florida to build an artificial fish haven. The reef was being built with discarded concrete badge pilings, dumped in an area approximately 7 miles offshore Florida east coast. But getting to final results took about a half dozen tools in SonarWiz, some recently updated in thelatest release of the software. Split – Auto (to take out turns) and with a mouse, for breaking a line at a specific point. In this project, …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 11 | Oct 2022 In SonarWiz 7.10.00, we are introducing a new geodetic engine. The new engine is based on the popular open-source PROJ library and gives SonarWiz support for modern dynamic datums, datum ensembles and derived projected coordinate reference systems (CRS) we have not been able to support in previous versions of SonarWiz. Why did we decide to switch geodetic libraries? The geodetic library is responsible for accurately converting a geographic position on the Earth (latitude, longitude and altitude) into, and out of, the Cartesian coordinate system (X,Y,Z) used internally by SonarWiz. In other words, it …

Chesapeake Times, Vol 11 | Oct 2022 Software development has been on my mind lately. SonarWiz V7.10.00 is a big release and has been under development since June 2022. In this version of SonarWiz we made a significant change by updating our geodesy engine. This update took a significant amount of the development time. During development we had to replace the current code while trying to not rewrite significant parts of SonarWiz and to keep SonarWiz’s backwards compatibility. While rewriting code can be good we have to approach it with a bit of thought. As a programmer I have an …