New USB-based 3D digital echo sounder system for mapping and assessing fish and aquatic plants

Abstract

A recently developed echo sounder with a global positioning system (GPS) receiver can display both the boat position and echo gram. However, this information is displayed in different views. In this paper, we present a new digital three-dimensional (3D) echo sounder system comprising a traditional analog echo sounder, GPS receiver, notebook personal computer (PC), and a low-cost, compact, self-developed universal serial bus (USB)-based analog-to-digital (A/D) converter board. Multiple echo views can simultaneously display various desired targets more clearly than the view in a traditional analog echo sounder. The newly developed analysis software can precisely extract the information related to bottom depth, plants, and fish schools from the echoes. By combining the acoustic and position data, the system can map both the fish and plant echoes on the 3D sea bed generated from the extracted bottom depth. This system has been proved to be useful in observing the 3D and wide-area distribution of both fishes and aquatic plants and in studying habitat parameters in aquatic ecosystems. A notebook PC equipped with the self-developed USB-based A/D converter board is capable of transforming any traditional analog echo sounder into a high-performance 3D digital echo sounder.