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 – …
Sub-bottom and Bathymetry: Contacts aren’t just for Sidescan!
Chesapeake Times, Vol 8 | January 2022 One of the most powerful tools in the sidescan post processing arsenal of SonarWiz is the contact, an item which location and characteristics can be captured and saved. After these contacts are created on sidescan files they can be edited, measured, classified, and final reports can be built for your customer in a variety of formats. But did you know that users processing multibeam and sub-bottom data can also utilize these features? For sub-bottom data, contacts can be placed in the digitizing view similarly to drawing reflectors. In a situation where the user …
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 …
Updates to SonarWiz Magnetometer
Chesapeake Times, Vol 4 | January 2021 During the first quarter of this year we are rolling out several improvements to the SonarWiz Magnetometer module. Here, I would like to highlight some of the more interesting changes. The first group of changes are in the Project Explorer and the Properties Window. We have shortened the display name of the magnetometer CMF lines to just the filename and removed the full path display. Selecting a CMF file populates the Properties window where you can review and modify all relevant settings for the selected file. We have also fleshed out the CMF and anomaly context …
New Editing Capabilities in ZEdit
Chesapeake Times, Vol 4 | January 2021 ZEdit is Chesapeake’s utility program for editing series data in CSF, CMF (magnetometer) and XTF files. A common operation there is smoothing and removing anomalies from one-dimensional data, via its bottom “graph” view. We’ve added a few features in recent versions that are aimed at helping out with some of these series-editing tasks; these are highlighted below. First, CSF sound velocity is now an editable field. Many of the file types SonarWiz can import allow for a per-ping sound velocity, but the ability to edit those values after import wasn’t present except for the case …
Reconnecting Project File Path References
Chesapeake Times, Vol 3 | October 2020 The structure and nature of SonarWiz projects require various connections from items created and images or databases in your project folder. Our support team frequently hears from customers saying they are missing contacts, files etc. especially after a project has been moved from one workstation to another. To address this common issue, our developers created a tool to reconnect these file paths. It is located under the Tools tab in the program, Locate Project Files… The goal here is to see all green status and repair path names that have become broken due …
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 …
Developing Specifications for SonarWiz on AWS
Chesapeake Times, Vol 3 | October 2020 SonarWiz 7.7 will be the first release of SonarWiz to be officially supported on Amazon AWS. As we prepare to release this new version of the program, we have been working to develop best practices and recommendations for setting up an AWS environment that will run SonarWiz as efficiently as possible. We developed a short list of typical sidescan operations that we are using to benchmark different AWS configurations. In our initial experiments we tested 13 different AWS configurations and one laptop for comparison and measured how long they took to complete our …
Cloud Considerations for Survey Processing
Chesapeake Times, Vol 3 | October 2020 Recently we’ve seen a good deal of interest in cloud platform services and related inquiries into how SonarWiz would run in their environments. Companies stand to see a lot of benefits from these relatively low-cost, scalable, externally-managed resources, and we’ve been investigating the various opportunities and challenges involved in utilizing them. Originating mainly as internal services used by large tech companies, cloud platforms started to be offered to the public in the early 2000s. Initially utilized by customers primarily as hosting and web software delivery platforms, cloud services have seen increasing use as …
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 Single-Band GeoTIFFs of Sidescan Data
Chesapeake Times, Vol 7 | October 2021 What is a Vertical GeoTIFF?? GeoTIFF is a public domain metadata standard which allows geo-referencing information to be embedded within a TIFF file (Wikipedia). Normally, the GeoTIFF format is used for geo-referenced images, where each pixel in the TIFF represents a color to display at a specified geographic location. The metadata in the TIFF encodes the geospatial information needed to render the image at the appropriate location on the earth. SonarWiz offers extensive support for exporting seafloor imagery in this format. More recently, GeoTIFFs have been used to encode physical measurements rather than just imagery. …
Quick Survey Time Estimation
Chesapeake Times, Vol 7 | October 2021 There are a handful of tools in SonarWiz, that, together, can help you make quick work of putting together a survey time estimate. After creating a project in the intended location/zone, create or import a closed polygon feature matching the area to be surveyed. In this example I’ll import a 1.8km x 1.9km rectangle from a shapefile; if no vector representation of the area is available, making a closed polygon feature by hand will do for a quick estimate. Right-click the Features node of the Explorer tree and select “Import…” to open the feature …
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 …
A New Tool for Bathy Editing
In the latest version of SonarWiz, processing bathymetry just got a little easier. (In my opinion, of course). Editing data is relatively straightforward, finding those soundings that are “flyers” or “anomalies”, which as hydrographers, we determined are invalid and need to be removed. But sometimes we miss finding the sounding and it remains in the dataset, requiring us to go back into the editor for further editing. It could be just one or two points from hundreds of thousands of good ones. SonarWiz 7.8.0 has a new editing tool to work directly on the bathy data in the main display …
Applying Antenna Elevations SonarWiz
Chesapeake Times, Vol 6 | July 2021 When real-time kinematic (RTK) corrections are available in the survey area, it is possible to achieve sub-decimeter vertical positioning of the sonar system without the need to apply tides or vessel squat measurements. Bathymetry collected in this way is referenced to the satellite ellipsoid rather than to the more conventional orthometric or tidal datum, so it is usually required to apply a vertical transformation to move the bathymetry into the desired output datum. SonarWiz has all the tools needed to perform these calculations in a straightforward workflow. Navigation and Attitude Editor The first …
Adding Tides & Starting Elevation to Sub-Bottom Data
Chesapeake Times, Vol 6 | July 2021 New for SonarWiz 7.8.0 – we are adding the ability to utilize Tide data to correct Sub-Bottom sonar data. In addition to Tide data we are also adding a Starting Elevation value for each Sub-Bottom file. This will allow the user to specify the elevation for the survey. SonarWiz Sub-Bottom data has several sources of Elevation data and Depth data: These data add together to describe where the sonar is located vertically. In other words a Vertical Offset of the Sub-Bottom sonar data. This information together with the travel time will allow a more accurate location for …
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