CUBE Gridding Engine Added to SonarWiz

In a development allowing users to immediately visualise vast amounts of bathymetry, sub-bottom, and sidescan data, Chesapeake Technology (USA) has added a gridding engine to its SonarWiz software.

The new gridding capabilities allow users to quickly and easily create swath bathymetry and amplitude grids using complex algorithms such as the NOAA-supported Combined Uncertainty and Bathymetry Estimator (CUBE). Users can view and edit the resulting grids within SonarWiz and then export them to 20 industry-standard GIS and visualisation formats.

Traditional backscatter processing systems deliver their output as one-dimensional tiff or jpeg images that do not reflect the full range of amplitude data modern sonars collect. SonarWiz now allows customers to grid amplitude data and generate summary statistics for each sonar node. The resulting grid product is a statistically meaningful measure of seafloor amplitude but at much more manageable data volumes.