Qimera 1.4 Release Notes

RELEASE 1.4 - December 13th, 2016

QPS is pleased to release Qimera 1.4, the fourth full feature release since its initial launch 18 months ago. As always, our primary mission with Qimera is to make hydrographic data processing intuitive and as simple as possible, all the while offering powerful capabilities to those that need them without cluttering the workflow for those that don't.

With this release, we make yet another step forward on our roadmap to realign and adjust the software products from the QINSy and Fledermaus families. This time, we've turned our attention to our water column processing software, FMMidwater, another tool that comes from the Fledermaus suite of software. We have aimed squarely at providing augmented capability for hydrographic and charting applications, you can now select soundings over water column targets like wrecks and other features of significance to charting applications. The selected points are georeferenced and refraction corrected using the QINSy multibeamer engine, which brings a big improvement over the georeferencing capabilities of FMMidwater. Though we've focused on hydrographic and charting applications, users will find that we've brought over quite a few of the ideas and tools in FMMidwater such that any user of FMMidwater may find most of what they need in Qimera. For example, you can tune the water column signal to quickly isolate and quickly extract points of interest in the water column such as subsea infrastructure or naturally occurring features like gas seeps. Compared to working in FMMidwater, you will find a much improved and streamlined experience, we've summarized all of the improvements in the water column section below.

If you have Qimera or Qimera Pro and you already have FMMidwater, then this capability will work for you without any licensing upgrades. For Qimera or Qimera Pro users, this new capability is available as an add-on upgrade, please contact sales@qps.nl for more information. For FMMidwater users, we invite you to download an evaluation version of Qimera to give this a try to see if it suits your workflow. If it does, please contact sales@qps.nl for a quote for an upgrade from your Fledermaus bundle to Qimera Pro.

Read on for details below and, as always, please get in touch with us via the online support system if you have any questions about how the new features may fit into your existing workflows. There are several features to highlight in this release, as you'll see below. Many of the other new features are driven by client feedback and feature requests and for these we thank our clients for getting in touch with us with their great ideas!

What's New

New Capabilities & Workflows

Water Column Sounding Extraction

You can now digitize extra soundings from the water column display in Qimera. A single-click at a time, or threshold your signal and grab a bunch in one go with the lasso selection tool. Soundings get georeferenced using the QINSy multibeamer engine and you can even save a water column snapshot in your Scene to help you keep track of your work. We've got a fantastic workflow for wreck investigations that lets you quickly scan through data, get the bits that you want, with them being automatically included in computed soundings and gridded products. If you work with CUBE surfaces, you can have your manually detected targets automatically tagged as 'features' and then have the CUBE surface create custom hypotheses for the features that you find. The image below shows the top of a mast being added as an additional sounding, and the Fan view being added as a snapshot into the 4D Scene.

The new water column filter settings dialog lets you condition the water column imagery to help isolate the targets of interest for easy target extraction. The sidelobe and bottom suppression let you get rid of nuisance signals with ease, allowing you to refine the signal to the portion of interest to you and your application.

The following sequence of eight images show how the filter settings can be used to quickly refine raw water column imagery to get at exactly what you want, in this case, some aquaculture cages and mooring cables that were not adequately detected by the multibeam.

Raw water column fan view

2. Stacked fan view, all pings in buffer are stacked.

3. Apply the sidelobe filter to reduce reverberation.

4. Set a minimum signal strength threshold.

5. Enable the stacked side view.

6. Select water column targets using lasso.

7. Load points in 3D Editor for editing.

8. Extract user picked points for visualization.

Improvements over FMMidwater

We've taken some time to examine the improvements over the FMMidwater workflows to help FMMidwater users make an informed decision on whether or not they should have a look at what Qimera offers.

Better Experience
- You get an integrated view in the 4D Scene compared to FMMidwater's 2D view. It’s like having a combination of Fledermaus and FMMidwater. You can also add Fledermaus SD objects in Qimera for quick contextual analysis to help guide feature extraction. FMMidwater required a visit to Fledermaus for this.
- You can create a bathymetric grid within Qimera and handle this seamlessly within the app, extracted soundings are added to the grids, FMMidwater required gridding in another application and then import of the grid.
- Integrated point editing lets you color code points to isolate your picks and to refine which points you want to keep; you can easily reject excessive points or blunders.
- You can plot the sonar's bottom detections as an overlay to your fan to help you understand what the sonar did and did not detect. This only worked for some sonars in FMMidwater.
Faster Workflow
- Import files and get to your water column view in a few clicks only, FMMidwater required an import and conversion process.
- Qimera doesn't create GWC files so the disk footprint size of a project is greatly reduced and the time to get to your first look at your data is also greatly reduced.
- You can have your picks automatically marked with the Feature Flag, this enables quick custom hypothesis generation in CUBE processing that lets your picks over-ride the original CUBE estimate of depth.
- It's much, much quicker to click on top of a mast, integrate and QC with original soundings. We've timed this for a test file with a wreck. It takes one minute. Literally.
More Capability
- Only Kongsberg .all/.wcd could be ray traced and georeferenced. Qimera now does this for .all, .s7k and .db (Kongsberg, R2Sonic, Reson and Norbit currently).
- Qimera can elegantly handle dual head multibeam data in the same view, FMMidwater could not gracefully.
- More point extraction methods: lasso, rectangle, polygon (FMMidwater only had polygon).
- You can stack the fan view and you can pick in it, FMMidwater did not let you pick in the stacked fan view.
- A new bottom suppression filter lets you easily isolate the water column portion of the signal, this capability did not exist in FMMidwater.
- You can add picks to a grid, or not. Qimera marks your additional user detections with a special flag to allow you to easily keep your extra points separate from the sonar's real-time detections.
Improved Results and QA
- Georegistration using QINSy multibeamer engine is a big improvement over the UNB method used in FMMidwater.
- Qimera uses the QINSy uncertainty propagation engine to compute the positional uncertainty of your extra picks (TPU, total propagated uncertainty).
- All of the power of Qimera bathymetric processing is at your finger tips if you need it: import improved navigation, apply a tide correction or a new SVP or correct vessel configuration problems. Your soundings are updated along with all of the original sonar soundings.
- Navigation interpolation between survey lines is the norm in Qimera, this lets you pick up the first and last few pings that FMMidwater would not have handled.
- Extracted points are persisted to disk and reloaded every time you review water column data. You can look back at what you’ve previously extracted and add to it.
- A quick fan “snapshot” within the water column widget lets you drop a Fan or Curtain object into the scene to help you keep track of your work.
Export Improvements
- You can export your Qimera Scene and pick right up in Fledermaus, where you can add other data types and do analysis in the way that you always have.
- You can do batch exporting of multiple files simultaneously.
- You can export SD point objects or point clusters for further examination in Fledermaus.
- You can export SD points from multiple lines into a single SD.
- You can export your raw picked data (range and angle for a beam) to a GSF file, along with the raw sensor data, for bathymetric processing in other software.

Vessel Configuration Templates

You can now save your vessel configuration setup, including XYZ sensor location offsets, angular alignment offsets, sensor uncertainty parameters (for TPU), etc, as a vessel configuration template that can be applied to files with Qimera Live or during manual import. This greatly improves the user experience for clients who have "lean" data formats that do not provide vessel configuration information. This is also useful for "rich" data formats that do provide vessel configuration information but have an error in the original data that you would like to systematically override in post-processing. With this capability, users will only need to enter information one time and the configuration template can preserve it for use in later import sessions and even for other projects. Qimera protects you also from human error by verifying that the vessel templates match the make, model and sonar serial number during import to ensure that you don't accidentally apply the wrong configuration. Though this is a new option, it is not a necessary step. If your data files are in good shape already, you do not have extra hoops to jump through and your workflow is as streamlined as it was before this. You're welcome! Note that these configuration templates are different from QINSy template.db files since they must accommodate all third party file formats that QINSy's template.db file is not designed to support.

To start, you edit the vessel configuration to your desired settings in the Vessel Editor after importing one of your files. There is a new button to save your configuration on the top row of buttons, as shown below.

The next time that you import data to your project, you can choose to apply the vessel configuration and it will over-ride the configuration that is found in the incoming data files.

Or, if you like to work in a "just in time" fashion with Qimera Live while offshore, you can also specify the configuration when you set up Qimera Live, as shown below. We've also made some improvements to the layout and wording of the Qimera Live start up dialog to improve understanding and usability.

TCARI

Built for the North American hydrographic/charting market, this capability makes Qimera attractive for NOAA charting work. TCARI is a custom tidal computation solution that NOAA has built in-house to serve their vertical referencing needs for their charting work. We have loosely coupled Qimera with the NOAA TCARI runtime environment in the same way that we embedded Kongsberg SISQA Blackbox: this is a complete under the hood implementation that hides the TCARI engine from the user. You can download and compute TCARI tides and then manage this information using the intuitive experience in Qimera. Previous NOAA workflows using other hydrographic processing software required leaving the processing application to run the custom NOAA tools, Qimera offers an integrated experience that makes it very simple to import the TCARI file (.tc) and get straight to work. Having it integrated into your post-processing application gives augmented QA and it saves time and effort in addition to cutting down on human error when hopping back and forth between different software applications. TCARI is a tidal solution unique to NOAA, if you're curious about it, have a look at their write-up on the TCARI webpage.

Single Beam Support for QINSy Users

With this release, we are providing preliminary support for Single Beam Echosounders (SBE) in Qimera. This early first step at supporting SBE takes advantage of the online computations from QINSy and preserves the SBE results that are generated in the QPD while online. When you go offline and come to Qimera, you can import your QPDs for point processing and the SBE is present (this has always been the case), but now you can import the .db files as raw sonar files and the SBE data will be preserved throughout re-processing. You can now apply post-processed navigation or tide corrections to the SBE data in the same way that you can for MBE data. When you re-raytrace MBE data, the SBE data is now preserved in the QPD whereas before all non-MBE sensor data was purged from the QPD. As part of the work of preserving the SBE systems during a multibeam re-raytrace operation, the QPD now also preserves information from other sensors such as sidescan or magnetometer that are on the same platform (object, in QINSy terminology). This means that you can use Qimera to safely apply tide and/or post-processed navigation to QPD files instead of having to split your workflow partially between Qimera and Processing Manager.

The Slice Editor view below shows data from a dual head MBE setup with data from three SBE systems. Once the data is in Qimera, you can edit it with the Swath Editor, Slice Editor and 3D Editor. Color coding by system lets you easily distinguish between the different systems. When creating grid products, you can also choose which systems you'd like to include.

Patch Test Write-Back for QINSy Users

Also now with this release, you can apply Qimera patch test results into the QINSy template.db file. This allows users to evaluate their patch test data in Qimera and then get straight back to mapping with QINSy since the next survey line that is recorded will immediately have the patch test results applied.

The way we have implemented this is a small pivot from what has been done previously in QINSy's Validator, so we've anticipated a few FAQs, which we've collected immediately below.

Q: Why only apply to Template.db? Why not apply to recorded .db files also like we can in Validator?

A: Before Qimera, users HAD to apply to acquired .db files because the only way to apply these values was to replay the data in QINSy. We now encourage reprocessing in Qimera instead and application to the logged .db files is no longer required. If users still need this, we recommend to clone the Template.db file settings to the necessary .db files in QINSy.

Q: Which files do results get applied to?

A: The patch test tool examines the directory where the patch test .db files reside and finds any Template .db files in there. The offsets are applied to all Template files in the directory. A check is done to ensure that system IDs match to guard against application to files with different sonar systems.

Q: Why can’t I choose which template files I want to apply to?

A: We created first a simple workflow for simple setups that largely consist of a single template.db file in the raw data directory. If you require more sophisticated application abilities, please get in touch with us.

Kongsberg NavLab

Working closely with our colleagues at Kongsberg, we have implemented support for the Kongsberg NavLab file format, which is a key capability for Kongsberg Hugin and Munin AUV users. The NavLab format provides pressure and/or depth for these submersible vehicles and it streamlines the data processing experience for these users. You can also now import pressure time-series with the ASCII importer.

The sequence of screengrabs below shows the import experience for both raw pressure and post-processed 3D navigation files, along with the Processing Configuration tab for Depth/Pressure systems. To convert pressure to depth, you configure the atmospheric pressure and average water density. If you have both pressure and depth data, depth will always take priority over pressure, but you can disable the depth systems if you'd rather use the pressure measurements.

CUBE Processing Configuration

We've added new options for running CUBE that are tailored to NOAA hydrographic and charting work in North America. You can now choose from a number of NOAA CUBE preset combinations, below you can see the result of choosing the NOAA 2 m resolution preset. Though these could be useful to many users, they are largely tailored to the NOAA workflow since they have predefined sets of configurations depending on the grid resolution they are working with.

At the request of a few CUBE power users, we've added the ability to adjust some advanced CUBE parameters with an "Advanced" button on the CUBE settings dialog. Most users will never need to adjust these, but the capability to adjust these empowers researchers and power users to explore finer grained improvements to the CUBE algorithm.

SVP Editor Improvements

You can now specify the depth and/or sound speed sensor bias for your sound speed profile data. These are used to adjust the raw measurements to correct them prior to application during the refraction correction stage in Qimera. If you have a biased sound speed profiler sensor, it's now very easy to correct for this in post-processing in Qimera. The screengrab below shows the new entry fields for these parameters.

Dynamic Surface Improvements

Under the Dynamic Surface menu, you can now launch a "Bin Information" widget that reports all of the values of the various data layers stored in a Dynamic Surface for your current mouse position in the Scene. See below for an example.

You can now also extract the layers of the Dynamic Surface, such as the bin count, standard deviation, etc, for use within Qimera for Quality Assurance work or for export as a deliverable to a client as a geotiff, for example. The two dialogs shown below are accessed from the Dynamic Surface menu options "Snapshot as Static Surface" and "Extract Property Layer". Both of these generate Fledermaus .SD files that are included in your project in the Project Layers widget. They can be exported as images or grids for inclusion in project deliverables.

Feature Set List

We've made a number of other features, tweaks and improvements. These are listed below, along with all the features explored above, with a bit of explanation if necessary.

Water Column
- Midwater sounding extraction
  - Least depth capabilities for wreck surveys
  - Feature extraction
- Reson Compressed Water Column format is now supported, both for .db and .s7k format
Data Import Improvements and New Formats
- Vessel configurations can now be saved for re-use during manual import and/or with Qimera Live
- Kongsberg NavLab binary navigation format can now be imported, both pressure and/or post-processed 3D navigation are supported
- XSE format is now supported for ELAC multibeam systems
- ASCII conversion to QPD improvements have been made for FMHydro clients who work primarily with ASCII processed point data files
- The ASCII parser now allows a wild card character to make it easier to import data with non-ASCII characters
Tide
- NOAA's custom TCARI engine has been interfaced for direct use within Qimera
- Improved tide management for Predicted/Observed/Verified tides, you can now specify the type of tide when you import and if you have multiple types of data per station, these are now prioritized for you.
QPS Seamless Workflow
- Preliminary single beam support from .db. You can import db/qpd data with SBE data and it will be preserved in all operations in Qimera. You can grid it and edit it, as well as applying an updated vessel 3D track or a tide.
- Qimera to QINSy patch test results can now be applied to Template.db files
- Import QGF and DXF/DWG
- Support for Common Geodetics Folder. QINSy 8.15 now has a separate geodetic resources installer that uses the "Common Files" directory. Qimera will now look in that directory for common resources. In the near future, this will enable for a smaller Qimera installer since the geodetic resources will be moving to a separate installer.
Data Validation and QA/QC
- NOAA CUBE parameters as an option in the CUBE configuration dialog, along with Advanced CUBE settings for power users
- New Dynamic Surface bin information widget
- Export additional QA surfaces, you can export the layers of the Dynamic Surface as a Static Surface or as flat image
Misc
- Sound velocity profiles now have the option to specify a depth bias and a sound speed sensor bias
- Patch test can run with a single line, this is handy when you forget to break the line recording during a patch test

Bug Fixes

We typically deal with bug fixes in our maintenance releases. Here is a list of those that we've fixed since our last maintenance release (Qimera version 1.3.6).

Correction to application of vessel squat, this was failing prior to this release
Corrections for various geodetic problems with vertical referencing for QINSy users of OSGM15
Custom Hypotheses now working correctly for CUBE processing, these were previously overridden during a re-CUBE operation
Patch test calibration report PDF report now contains pictures and is consistent with the HTML report
The reading of position data from some Kongsberg .all files was failing due to non-compliant NMEA strings
Multi-plot is corrected to plot beam data for multiple beams simultaneously
GSF files imported as processed point files were previously ignoring flagged data in the GSF so users could did not have the option to unflag, this has been corrected and Qimera now imports and correctly flags data that is flagged in the GSF for rejection

Installation, Upgrade and Ongoing Support Information for Existing Users

Users with existing Qimera 1.3 projects will be able to open them in Qimera 1.4 but the projects will become upgraded to version 1.4 and will not be able to be re-opened in Qimera 1.3. The water column capabilities in this release require extraction of additional information from raw MBE files, which was not done in Qimera 1.3 or older projects. Users interested in taking advantage of the new water column capabilities are advised to start with fresh projects in Qimera 1.4.

The Qimera 1.1 release had introduced new beam flagging capabilities that required a QPD upgrade. Users with older Qimera 1.0 projects will need to upgrade their QPDs when moving to Qimera 1.4. You will be prompted to upgrade the QPDs in your project when it is first opened.

During the development phase for Qimera 1.4, we paid close attention to incoming bug reports from our clients and we've streamlined our release process to get fixes out to clients in a timely manner, as often as required. This new, streamlined process enabled delivery of twenty-one bug fix releases since the launch of Qimera 1.0 in June of 2015. We will continue to provide this quick turnaround level of service to our customers with Qimera 1.4. If you find a bug that stops your workflow, please contact us and we'll attempt to get a fix to you as quickly as possible.

When we first released Qimera, we purposely kept it lean and mean with the intent of focusing on client feedback to help direct us on how best to hone existing capabilities and also to help us decide which new functionality clients need most. We've done the same with Qimera 1.1 through to Qimera 1.4, so please keep ideas and feedback coming, it helps us to make Qimera better for all users! Please feel free to contact us via the online support system for feedback, feature requests and bug reports.

Documentation

The Reference Manual has been updated for all features in this release
We're continuing to update other Knowledge Base articles. The online versions always have the freshest content.
Several new "How To" style documentation is available to give some guidance on how to use some of the new features in Qimera 1.4. The online versions are always most up-to-date.

Limitations & Known Issues

Qimera should not open QINSy projects while QINSy is running, acquiring data or generating Dynamic Surfaces. Data loss may occur if this warning is not heeded. Qimera is currently meant to only open QINSy projects after they are acquired. If you need to use Qimera with QINSy in a real-time environment, it is recommended that you configure QINSy to copy DB files to a backup directory at the end of each line. You should then create a new Qimera project and use Qimera Live (available as of Qimera 1.1) to monitor the backup directory, import the data, process it and add it to a Dynamic Surface.

If you are a QINSy and Qimera user, you should not copy the QINSy project to another location on the same computer as the original QINSy project. We are currently improving how file paths to various resource files and project file assets are managed between our applications, in the meantime, if you want to process a copy of your QINSy project in Qimera, you should copy it onto another computer. This is a known limitation that we are actively working on to fix and we will let you know when this limitation no longer applies. Of course, if you are willing to work directly on the QINSy project once it is offline, then this is the preferred option and you can ignore this warning.

RELEASE 1.4.1 - Dec 23rd, 2016

Fixes and Improvements

Technical Notes

- Water Column tool
  - In the Water Column tool, the bottom suppression will now work properly for multi sector MBES systems.
  - Certain data was causing a crash when Side view or Stacked view was enable in the Water Column dock. This has been fixed.
  - Exporting Water Column picks as SD objects (not merged into a single file) will no longer cause a crash.
- 3D Editor
  - Tide and Heave values from GSF files will be populated in the 3D Editor attributes table.
  - Fixed a crash that was occurring in 3D Editor when switching between lines that have Water Column picks to those that don't.
- Miscellaneous
  - The Vessel Editor will now display correct offsets when there are multiple vessels.
  - Some of the SVP Editor buttons were causing a crash when there was no SVP in the project. This has been fixed.
  - Unfinished polygon selections in Slice Editor were remaining in memory after the tool was closed. This has been fixed.
  - The Cross Check Tool will now display correct values for the Reference Z-Range.
- Tide
  - Fixed a bug that only affected Qimera 1.4.0 and caused the application to crash when importing certain ASCII Tide data.

Limitations & Known Issues

The EGM2008.bin geoid file must be manually moved to the Qimera\Resources\QINSy_Geodetics\Geoid folder even if it has been installed using the latest QPS installer. Please contact support if you need assistance.

RELEASE 1.4.2 - Jan 20th, 2017

Special note for QINSy Kongsberg users

This pertains to users that meet ALL of the following criteria:

1) Have a project that was opened or created with Qimera 1.3.6 or earlier.

2) Are using Kongsberg MBES data logged in QINSy

3) Modified MBES head roll offsets previous to 1.4.0

We advise those meeting the above criteria to start a new project or reset their current Qimera project by removing the qpsproject.xml file from the project folder. Crashing can occur with Qimera 1.4.0 or 1.4.1. Qimera 1.4.2 fixes the crashing but if the project is not reset, an incorrect roll offset could be introduced in the Vessel Editor.

Fixes and Improvements

Highlights

We are very pleased to announce that this release includes installers for the Linux and Mac OSX operating systems.

Additionally:

When a Fledermaus scene is exported from Qimera it will now contain the background chart.
Qimera now supports the EPSG 9.0 database
GSF 3.0.7 is now supported in Qimera

Technical Notes

Dynamic Surface
- Qimera will no longer crash when a Dynamic Surface is built that is larger than available disk space.
- The user will also be warned before creating a Dynamic Surface that could be too large for available space.
- Dynamic Surfaces will now update correctly when non English characters are present in a folder name.
- A problem with separate Dynamic Surfaces changing their bounds after updates has been fixed.
Vessel Editor
- Internal sonar array offsets for the Kongsberg EM2040P are now set correctly.
Sound Velocity
- Lags caused by adding SVPs or changing information in an SVP are now reduced.
- Certain SVPs containing many casts will now import much more quickly.
- Fixed a problem where certain SVPs were batch imported incorrectly.
Slice Editor
- When Auto Zoom is turned off, the Slice Editor will only zoom to the available points the first time a surface is edited. Any additional Slice Editor work on that surface will use the last zoom extents.
- Scroll Select positions and Polygon selections will no longer be stored in memory.
- While using the polygon selection tool, centre clicking will no longer create a point and will only recentre the view.
Time Series Editors
- Zooming, shifting and scaling of time series in the Time Series Multiplot tool have been improved.
3D Editor
- Window focus now remains on the 3D Editor after changes are saved.
- Launching the 3D Editor sometimes failed if there were non English characters in the file path name. This has been fixed.
- The 3D Editor can now be launched with a selection that only contains flagged (rejected) points.
- A problem with the Surface Edit Overview behaving incorrectly when the 3D Editor was minimized has been fixed.
- Fixed a problem where certain file names were displayed incorrectly in the 3D Editor attributes table.
GSF
- When delayed heave is applied to data that is exported to GSF, the delayed heave time series will be exported rather than the real time heave.
- Fixed a problem affecting the heading of GSFs exported from Qimera.
Water Column
- A problem with EM3002D water column data collected in QINSy was resolved.
- With certain sonar systems, the water column data was duplicated and mirrored on both sides of the swath. This has been fixed.
- R2Sonic data logged in QINSy is now displayed properly. This problem affected only Qimera 1.4.0 and 1.4.1.
- Some of the metadata that was created upon loading raw sonar files was very large. This affects Qimera 1.4.0 and 1.4.1
  - Qimera now only saves this additional information if there is water column data present in the file.
  - The additional metadata that is created for working with water column data now takes up less disk space than previously.
Patch Test tool
- A crash that occurred when the user is prompted to save settings has been fixed.
Miscellaneous
- Interpolated soundings will no longer be visible in the Patch Test tool unless explicitly turned on.
- The navigation of certain files logged in QINSy was not being read correctly. This affected data configured with a State Plane projection.
- The 2017 leap second value (18) is now being applied correctly to imported SBTC data. The leap second value is now displayed in the import dialog.
- ENCs are now visible through a Dynamic Surface that has its opacity reduced.
- BAG files exported from Qimera could contain an unintended shift of half a pixel. This has been fixed.

RELEASE 1.4.3 - February 28th, 2017

Special note for Kongsberg users logging using .all files

This pertains to users that meet ALL of the following criteria:

Have brought Kongsberg .all files into Qimera
The .all files contain data from dual head EM3002 or dual head EM2040

A change has been made to when the phase centres are calculated during ray tracing. This fix corrects the footprint locations when full reprocessing is carried out but has not yet been applied for automatic conversion of soundings from the .all file. The error that has been corrected is vertical and the magnitude is between 0 and ~5 cm depending on the rotation angle of the transducer.

We advise those meeting the above criteria to do the following:

Trigger a full reprocessing of their data to recompute the footprint locations. This can be accomplished by selecting all lines and clicking on Tools -> Manual Reprocessing -> Sound Velocity Correction.
Disable automatic conversion of Kongsberg data. Go to Project -> Preferences -> uncheck the box next to 'Automatically convert Kongsberg / GSF sonar data on import'

Fixes and Improvements

Highlights

This release includes updated translations for Qimera 1.4.
When a raw sonar file is exported as a GSF file, the Plotted, Feature, and Suspect flags set will now be preserved in the resulting GSF.
Qimera will now detect if an Intel graphics device is being used for rendering and a message will be displayed. The reason for this warning stems from instabilities, including seemingly random crashes, that have been observed with the use of Intel graphics devices. If an alternate device is available it is advised to use it instead.

Technical Notes

Navigation and Geodetic
- Certain raw sonar files from Mesotech M3 systems were not having their navigation extracted successfully. This has been fixed.
- Fixed a bug where the application of an SBET resulted in the final ping of a file having incorrect height.
- The first pings of certain sonar files did not have the correct height after applying a separation model. This has been fixed.
- Fixed a bug where the grid convergence was applied with the wrong sign in reduction of the navigation lever arm, from the GNSS antenna location to the COG.
- The vertical component of the Rome 1940 transformation is now applied correctly.
Layers and CAD
- Fixed a bug where a specific DXF was not being imported correctly.
- Certain corrupt SD files were causing Qimera to crash. This has been fixed.
- Fixed a problem stemming from importing CAD files with text labels. Qimera now warns the user that there is text but it is being ignored because it is not currently supported.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the surface difference statistics dialog from being presented.
Slice Editor
- Under certain circumstances, rejected points were being displayed in the Slice Editor when they should not have been. This has been fixed.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing edits done in the Slice Editor from being unloaded to a GSF.
Multibeam processing and Filters
- A fix was made to the calculation of the phase centres of certain transducers during ray tracing calculations. See note above for more details.
- Fixed a problem with bottom detections not being plotted in the Water Column tool correctly. This affected systems that had a transducer head rotated 180 degrees.
- Some blocking filters were not being applied correctly to data from .all files that were automatically converted on import. This has been fixed.
Miscellaneous
- Qimera will now properly detect Qimera licenses when more than one HASP keys are plugged in.

RELEASE 1.4.4 - March 17th, 2017

Fixes and Improvements

Highlights

Raw sonar files exported as GSF will now have their flags handled correctly in MB-System. MB-System requires an additional flag to be set for edits.

Technical Notes

A change to how HASP Licensing was handled in Qimera 1.4.3 caused some licensing to not work properly. This has been fixed.
When a Qimera project was moved, and edits made afterwards, the Dynamic Surface(s) were not updating. Dynamic Surfaces in this situation will now update as expected.