Chesapeake Times
Technical Review, Issue 9
April 2022
Welcome to the 9th edition of Chesapeake Times. Since we started this newsletter back in 2020, it was our way to keep in touch with clients as we suddenly found ourselves locked away from everyone. Or it seemed that way for many of us. Fast forward to today - we’re back on the road traveling, heading to conferences, in person training and meeting up with colleagues. Tempus fugit, Latin for time flies. Perhaps not as fast as we wanted, but we’re back to our routine.

Since January, Chesapeake has released two updates to SonarWiz, as we continue the work on sidescan, sub bottom, bathymetry, and magnetometer. These updates are posted on our website, along with other information and user guides to get you going. Many of the features added are from our client’s requests, to make the software better, easier to use and faster for data processing. Your ideas and suggestions are reviewed weekly and added to the queue for development. I encourage you to continue to send in these requests or let us know next time you speak with our team. You’ll read about some of the advances in this newsletter.

Next month I hope you can join us at our regional training in Traverse City, MI for a three-day workshop, May 10 – 12. We’ll spend one day on each topic, with hands-on practice and data collection on board a vessel. I’m also pleased to announce our annual training to be held in Wilmington, NC on December 6-8. You’ll find details of these training sessions and more on our website.

- Harold Orlinsky, General Manager
New Features and Technical Notes

Sub-bottom Data Topographic Correction ................ Christopher Favreau, CTO
Improvements to Digitizer ........................................ Jonathan Fleetwood, Engineer
Automated Processing of Sidescan & Bathymetry .. David Finlayson, Chief Scientist
EdgeTech Motion Tolerant Sidescan in SonarWiz .... Harold Orlinsky, General Manager
Map Corrections: Let’s Clean Up These Boulders ... Patrick Zynda, Support Engineer
ATR Development with Terradepth .......................... Evan Martzial, Terradepth, Inc.
I described our support for Tides in SBP (Sub-Bottom Profiler) data in a previous article (CTI Times #6). In this new article, I will elaborate on how SonarWiz uses this and the other vertical offset information to correct the sonar image. The Topographic Correction in SonarWiz for SBP (Sub-Bottom Profiler) data straightens out the along track path of the sonar so that it is flat. The resulting image shows the seafloor as it is in the real world. In the illustration of an uncorrected image below, the bottom should be a continuous slope. Read full article
In recent and upcoming releases of SonarWiz, there are a couple of digitizer improvements of note.

In 7.9.2, a new feature was added to synchronize scrolling positions between multiple open waterfall windows. The control to turn this feature on and off is presently in the Advanced preferences page. Read full article
See Options > Advanced Preferences
What is Automated Processing? Automated processing is processing without human intervention. The purpose is to quickly and efficiently process large amounts of data with minimal human interaction. For sonar data processing, automation promises to remove or reduce the need for humans to perform routine and repetitive tasks...
Motion of a towfish with a yaw forces acting up the data. The resultant image will show the streaks of data in the across track direction
In the latest release, SonarWiz is now able to import and process the Motion Tolerant sidescan packet from EdgeTech sidescan sonars. The data packets, stored in subsystem 70 and 71, are collected by the EdgeTech 6205s and 4205 Sidescan sonars. While using a sidescan, having the fish travel with no external motion forces – pushing the fish left and right or up and down, will typically produce the best imagery. We can see this type of stability on AUV’s, as these are very stable platforms. However, a survey operation with either a fixed mount sidescan ... Read full article
While working with a customer recently, we had to solve an issue that sidescan processors deal with on a regular basis – My sidescan data has navigation issues and I need to use smoothing to clean up the image, but I need to maintain the positional accuracy. What do I do? In this example project after navigation and heading smoothing, my individual sidescan files look clean but as they overlap in the plan view, the same boulders are offset by +/- 15m which.. Read full article
Terradepth & Chesapeake have entered into an agreement to collaborate on a solution for Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in mosaiced imagery data.

This integrated workflow will connect Chesapeake's SonarWiz software and Terradepth's Absolute Ocean (AO) platform, making a seamless and straightforward ... Read full article
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