Chesapeake Times
Technical Review, Issue 12
Jan 2023
Letter from the General Manager – Harold Orlinsky

Happy New Year and welcome to 2023. We have a new year with 365 days to impress you. First out the door will be our 10.0.2 release; we wanted to start the year off with new features and changes to SonarWiz. You will read about these changes in this newsletter, with updates to the sidescan auto processing and export, magnetometer updates, and changes to the real time displays.

With the start of the new year, I also wanted to reflect on the last 365 days – with 7 releases and over 450 changes to the program (albeit not all major updates, but a change is a change). The team worked not only on new software updates, but new tools for tracking and testing these changes, with the goal of giving clients a release that has been thoroughly tested, and as Mary Poppins would say “practically
perfect in every way”.

Last year, we created unique processing tools for our users, and enhanced many of the programs, with a goal of making it easier and faster than before. Keeping up with the data – from more beams and more pings, to wider swaths and deeper ranges, challenged us to find solutions to handle the data more efficiently. And in my opinion, the increase in volumes of data isn’t going to slow down any time soon. To keep up with this, we have plans in 2023 to revise the way we store data, calling it “CSF version 2.” The goal is to remove a few bottlenecks, draw faster to the screen, process more quickly, and allow the work in the Cloud to take full advantage of the higher end CPUs that can be used there.

Last year, we formed new partnerships with sonar manufacturers, from both the data collection and data processing standpoints. We added new systems and formats, working closely with manufacturers on their new systems.

And finally, last year we welcomed new clients to the Chesapeake family. Thank you for allowing us to be part of your workflow. You will be in good company with hundreds of other companies that have trusted SonarWiz with their assignments.

In 2023, we plan to hold a few webinars in the springtime – a March Madness series, to go over the latest features and to take an in-depth look at some of the program modules. We plan to host a few local trainings in the US and overseas, and if we’re in your area, we hope you can attend. Along with a few conferences and workshops, we are on the road again! (Our travels are back!) I hope to see you at
some of these events.

With 350 days left to go in 2023, we have our work cut out for us. We invite you to challenge us on things that should be better. We have 4 planned releases this year, filled with user requests and new features to SonarWiz. Let us know how we are doing.

Welcome to 2023
New Features and Technical Notes

Auto Processing Advancements & the Future of SonarWiz .. Christopher Favreau, CTO
New Realtime Capabilities.............................................. Jonathan Fleetwood, Engineer
Magnetometer Updtes .................................................. David Finlayson, Chief Scientist
Spotting the Target on the Seafloor .......................... Harold Orlinsky, General Manager
50 years later,SEGY files are still running strong ........ Patrick Zynda, Support Engineer
Auto Processing Advancements and the Future Of SonarWiz
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 you can find it on SonarWiz’s Post-Processing tab in the settings drop down button under the SSS Auto Processing Settings as shown below.
New Realtime Capabilities
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 facilitate monitoring systems having both sub-bottom and sidescan channels, sidescan waterfall windows can now be scrolled sideways to match the corresponding sub-bottom signal ping-for-ping. In a waterfall showing both sidescan and sub-bottom monitors, right-click the sidescan monitor and select the "Horizontal" item; the sidescan display will scroll in the same direction as the sub-bottom display, inserting incoming pings on the right edge
Magnetometer Updates
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 the display of magnetometer data, with the new drawing modes, you will be able to select to draw the magnetometer line as colored dots representing either the raw or residual gamma values, or you can show a simple navigation plot. The user has complete control over the size and color palette of the gamma display and can change the color mapping on the fly. This is very similar to how users can work with Sonar data display and should be familiar to most SonarWiz users.
Spotting the Target on the Seafloor: Tools in SonarWiz to Help
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 the seafloor. Afterwards, features and areas of interest are highlighted and then further investigated. The challenge thus is to focus the secondary search only on targets of interest, specifically excluding the non-feature uniform seabed.

Two approaches were used and combining them would produce the desired result.
Single line mosaic. Fish haven is in center (clearly noted)
50 years later and SEGY files are still running strong!
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 didn’t contain many customization options. Since most software packages can both read and write SEGY files, there is an endless number of combinations of byte location configurations and now SonarWiz can fully support any of these coming in or out of the program! 
Come See SonarWiz at Upcoming Events

28 February •  New Geodesy Engine
14 March • Magnetometer Updates
28 March • Bathymetry Utilities
11 Apr • SonarWiz+Terradepth Workflow
Oi America 2023
14-15 Feb 2023
San Diego Convention Center
THSOA Annual Meeting & Technical Talk 23 February 2023
Petroleum Club of Lafayette
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