Echopype: Enhancing the interoperability and scalability of ocean sonar data processing

Abstract

The recent expanded availability of autonomous ocean sonar systems has created a data deluge. Despite their potential in advancing our understanding of the marine ecosystems, a large proportion of these new data remains significantly under-utilized. Specifically, the sheer tedium in data wrangling has significantly diverted efforts of the research community away from answering scientific questions. One of the root causes of this problem is the lack of an interoperable and scalable analysis workflow that adapts well with the rapidly increasing data volume and can be easily integrated with other oceanographic observations. To address this challenge, we developed an open-source software package “Echopype” that leverages the power of existing distributed computing libraries in the scientific Python ecosystem to directly interface data storage and computation on the cloud. Echopype provides tools to convert manufacturer-specific data files to a standardized, labeled multi-dimensional format that is familiar to the wider oceanography and geoscience communities, and offers a uniform computational interface for data originating from heterogeneous instrument sources. We envision that the continued development of Echopype will catalyze broader use of sonar data in oceanographic studies.