Chesapeake Times, Vol 8 | January 2022Getting Started with SonarWiz If you are new to SonarWiz and purchase at least one new SonarWiz license, we want to make you and your team comfortable using it. New for 2022, we offer a complimentary 2-hour Zoom session to get you started. The session covers installing and licensing SonarWiz and a brief tutorial on using SonarWiz to process a sample data set. During the class, we answer as many SonarWiz questions as time allows. Up to 5 people can participate in this Zoom session, to be held during our normal business hours, 9:00am – …
SonarWiz Support for NavLab Navigation
Chesapeake Times, vol 8 | January 2022 New in SonarWiz 7.09, we are introducing binary support for Kongsberg NavLab BIN files to SonarWiz. Kongsberg uses NavLab post-processing software to calculate optimal position estimates for the HUGIN family of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). NavLab computes the orientation and velocity of the AUV, based on available sensors, such as GPS/acoustic positioning, doppler velocity and inertial measurement records. Navigation processed with NavLab is always more accurate than a real time navigation system with comparable sensors. Because NavLab processing occurs after the mission is completed, raw sonar data collected during the mission needs to …
SonarWiz Development: V7.09.00 and Beyond
Chesapeake Times, Vol 8 | January 2022 Some of you may have noticed that we have gone a while without a new SonarWiz release. SonarWiz V7.08.01 was released in September. Development on SonarWiz V7.09.00 was started in the spring of 2021. During this time the CTI engineering department has put a lot of work into SonarWiz V7.09.00. A lot of this work has been in preparing SonarWiz for localization. Localization basically means translating the application’s user interface into a different language. We are handling this in 3 steps: Change most of the places we handle words and sentences, known as strings, to handle more characters. Gather …
Side Scan Drawing Improvement
Chesapeake Times, Vol 4 | January 2021This month some of CTI’s development resources have been focused on updating our Side Scan drawing routines to more accurately map samples to pixels in the display. These drawing routines and their accuracy become more important as users require higher and higher resolutions due to increasing accuracy of navigation, sonar equipment, and project requirements. Years ago placement of data had to be to the meter. Now we are looking at projects that require down to 10cm and sometimes lower. What’s the Problem?There are two main issues we have been focusing our efforts on. These issues are: Along track …
Large File Handling in SonarWiz
Chesapeake Times, Vol 3 | October 2020 In the next version of SonarWiz, we added a few options to help folks with large files. We have seen the ever-increasing file sizes, as folks collect higher resolution data or just more data. Days of 8-bit sidescan and single beam echosounder have been replaced with 24-bit sidescan data and multibeam sonar. With each update, file sizes are larger, and sometimes, unmanageable to move from one machine to another, or take much, much longer to process. We have added in a few new features in the latest update to address this issue. Tool …
Updating Support and Documentation to the 21st Century
Chesapeake Times, Vol 7 | October 2021 Some of our legacy users can remember 20+ years ago when contacting the support team for then “SonarWeb” (the long-ago predecessor of SonarWiz) was simply giving John Gann a ring on his personal number. Over the past few years our goal has been to update our support systems so that our customers can have access to fast and knowledgeable assistance on not just SonarWiz but the industry as a whole. After moving our online support desk over to JIRA in 2018, we have now begun to move our Knowledge Base of documentation over …
Mind the Gap – in Sidescan
Chesapeake Times, Vol 7 | October 2021 The traditional sidescan system with port and starboard channel have the inherent “space” between the channels when viewing the data. Once bottom tracked, the two sides get stretched to form a filled area. However, the imagery at and close to nadir is never ideal; identifying targets are difficult, and any shadows from them would be small. Standard operation would be to run additional sidescan lines offset from the original line, with good imagery to fill in the data at the nadir area. A decent solution but one that comes with a penalty. A …
Creating a GeoTIFF From an Online Basemap
Chesapeake Times, Vol 7 | October 2021 SonarWiz contains many individual capabilities. This alone makes it powerful software. These capabilities can be combined in various ways to extend that functionality. In this article I will go over one such use where I will configure an Online Basemap and then convert it to a GeoTIFF Basemap. In SonarWiz, a Basemap is a raster or vector map that is shown on the Plan View behind the sonar and other imagery. SonarWiz has many types of maps that it can use as a Basemap. The Online Basemap option will download the satellite image from an online database. While …
New Far Field Tracking for Sidescan Data
Chesapeake Times, Vol 6 | July 2021 In version 7.07.05 of SonarWiz, we added the ability for sidescan users to track the far-field of their data in post processing in order to remove erroneous data that was captured during the survey. Often times when recording sidescan data in a narrow river or canal, you will often see the edges of your swath range display washed out like the image below. In prior versions of SonarWiz, you could use the Far Field Threshold tool in the Advanced Settings dialog to attempt to remove this data, but it offered almost no control …
Updates to Gains in 7.07.05
Chesapeake Times, Vol 5 | April 2021 In SonarWiz 7.07.05 we will be introducing several changes to the sidescan and sub-bottom gain dialogs to make them easier to use and to support a new workflow for EGN. We’ve also removed an undocumented normalization step in gain processing that dates back to the 8-bit era of SonarWiz. Taken together, these changes may affect how your processed data looks, especially if you stack gains to achieve a particular effect. We hope that the changes make it easier to understand how gains are being applied to your data. A bit of SonarWiz HistoryUntil …
Sidescan Webinar Q&A
This is a list of questions and answers that accompanied our webinar “Sidescan Mosaic Tips”, held June 10, 2020. This webinar lasted one hour and covered Sidescan theory and tips on how to make better mosaics. Please see Training > Webinars & Recordings to view the webinar.
A-B Change Detection for Sidescan
By Howard Unkeles and Harold Orlinsky Creating a sidescan mosaic for a survey is easy. And doing a second survey is also easy. You can even use the same line plans, as the area is known. But what’s difficult is to find any differences between the two. A visual inspection will find new features, or if there if something moved. But imagine doing this for a huge survey area, a 1:10,000 boat sheet or an area like the Port of Los Angeles. This inspection would take a while, and subtle differences might be overlooked. In the upcoming release, we created an automated tool to analyze …
Forward Looking Sonar for Sidescan
By Chris Favreau, Program Manager We are adding support for Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) systems to SonarWiz 7.6. While the data for FLS systems look similar to other sonar systems such as Side Scan Sonar (SSS), FLS data is different and presents its own challenges. The FLS data is presented as a snapshot much like a video frame. It can be thought of as an acoustic video camera. This yields many frames per second resulting in a large amount of overlapping data. Each frame consists of multiple beams spread over the field of view (FOV). These beams have an area of …
Processing Multibeam Imagery in SonarWiz
By David Finlayson, Chief Scientist Multibeam echo sounder (MBES) imagery has improved dramatically in recent years and each new version of SonarWiz has introduced improved tooling for working with these data. Most of SonarWiz’s image processing and targeting tools are now also available for MBES systems. In this article we will take a look at the two different approaches offered by SonarWiz for processing MBES image data. A MBES image differs from traditional sidescan (see Figure 1). Each beam in a MBES is roughly equivalent to a complete side scan channel. To create an MBES image, the portion of the …