Side Scan Sonar

QINSy interfaces to most side scan sonar (SSS) systems commonly used in the hydrographic industry, whether they are hull-mounted, or towed behind the vessel housed in a fish. To position a towed fish, QINSy can use USBL positioning, cable counters and/or manual layback methods to compute fish track. Kalman filters of various strengths are available to smooth the track. If more than one method is employed to position the fish, QINSy will show and compare both positions.

online

Fish position is shown planimetrically on the Navigation Display, optionally against a backdrop of electronic navigation charts and/or Geotiff images. The Profile Display provides a side view of the fish relative to the towing vessel, sea surface and seabed DTM. This view is useful in determining appropriate winch reel-in and reel-out times.
A real-time waterfall type display is used to present the imagery data itself. Interesting features can immediately be captured using various targeting tools, and stored as targets for future reference. Target locations are shown in the Navigation Display as they are identified in the waterfall display.
Real-time mosaicking of the imagery is done through normalization and slant range corrections. If available, the imagery can be geo-referenced directly to a DTM.

The mosaic is shown in one layer of the “sounding grid” as viewed in the Navigation Display.

processing

For processing of the SSS data a dedicated SSS mosaic grid can be enabled in the Processing Manager. This high resolution grid can be combined with other hydrographic data if available. The Processing Manager includes a SSS viewer that is used for feature detection. With the look and feel of the real-time waterfall display, this viewer provides the same functionality as the SSS display available during online recording, with the added benefit of super-fast scrolling forward and backward through the data. The SSS viewer supports different ways, both automatic and manual, to perform bottom-tracking in order to correct for the slant range. The user can also create TVG files for normalization purposes.

products

Captured features are stored as a geo-referenced Tiff, or GeoTiff, and can be plotted on the SSS mosaic along with the other hydrographic data. Furthermore, creating a SSS contact database, in which all captured features are stored including the SSS image, feature classification and other relevant information, provides an outstanding reporting tool.