Applications of compression techniques for reducing the size of multibeam sonar records

Abstract

High efficiency of multibeam sonar system (MBS) hardware due to operational requirements (i.e. high frequency, high ping rate and high resolution of collected data) results in very large volumes of datasets stored on local hard drives of operatorpsilas station. In this context, the process of archiving of such warehouse of data collected in previous surveys becomes crucial problem. The paper investigates various lossy and lossless compression methods that can be applied to multibeam sonar data to reduce the size of acquired files without loosing relevant information. The specific character of MBS data allows applying various signal, image and video compression methods to achieve better results than when using standard ones. Various techniques of reordering the data were analyzed to achieve best possible compression ratio.