Qimera FMGT – 7.11.0 Release

December 22, 2023

We are pleased to present FMGT 7.11.0

Important notes

• With the FMGT 7.11.0 release the internal file formats have changed to reduce the amount of storage. This also means that projects created in FMGT version 7.11.0 are not able to be opened in earlier versions of FMGT.

  • NOTE: if you open a project from a previous version of FMGT (version 7.10.3 or earlier) you will need to manually clear the Adjust flag to continue with new processing, such as Mosaic, Statistics / Grid, or ARA layers. This is done by clicking on the Manual Processing tab > hitting the Clear Flags button, checking the Adjust checkbox and selecting OK.

• The QPS database (.db) format version has been incremented, .db files recorded in Qinsy 9.6.0 will need to be opened in FMGT 7.11.x and newer versions. 
  The database version upgrade includes:

  • Multibeam Record has been upgraded.

  • A new system type for Forward Looking Sonars

• The QPS .qpd file has been upgraded with the Qinsy 9.6.0 and Qimera 2.6.0 release. FMGT version 7.11.0 and newer releases will be able to read the new .qpd files. 

Highlights

• Improved support for large projects. An effort was made to improve support for large projects by ensuring all files are extracted and processed during mosaic creation. A few crashes were fixed, files that failed to filter and mosaic will now filter and mosaic correctly, and a speed improvement has been observed in the filtering stage (8x faster filtering on a large project).

• Roll compensated beam pattern correction. There is a new entry in the Processing Parameters > Adjust tab to Allow Beam Pattern Roll Compensation which allows for an adjustment of the beam angle by the amount of sonar roll before calculating the beam pattern. This setting works for systems that do not roll stabilize their transmitters (ie. Norbit, R2Sonic, Reson and some Kongsberg shallow water systems). This functionality requires that a beam pattern be selected or created.

• The Absorption correction processing parameter was made clearer by adding a checkbox to indicate that you will override the real-time absorption value when it is checked.

• Gridding backscatter has been improved by using the Statistics / Grid button. New use cases for using a gridded product over the mosaicing would be in areas of heavy overlap, for dealing with pings stepping forward and backward (ie heavy pitching or the Norbit STX system), and for dealing with interference problems. Here is what's been done:

  • An improvement was made to properly georeference snippet pixels for use in the Statistics gridding routine.

  • The default statistics / gridding suggested pixel size is now 5x the mosaic pixel size, which can be adjusted independently (ie. 1x) for gridding of backscatter.

  • A new option for Gridding Diameter in pixels and Nadir Distance Weighting was added to the pixel size edit window. The Gridding Diameter defaults to 1 pixel, meaning a snippet will only contribute to the pixel it lands in, for 3 pixels it could be up to 9 grid cells (3x3 box), and so on. The Nadir Distance Weighting applies a lower gridding weight to nadir snippets and increases linearly to the outer beams.

  • When gridding backscatter, all the statistics layers are generated. Typically a Mean, Median, or Mode Backscatter layer can be viewed to determine the best result. For instance, a Statistics Grid of backscatter Mode is much less sensitive to interference problems. Areas with heavy overlap can also benefit with improved imagery as you have more samples contributing to each pixel.

• Georegistered Snippet Export. We have added the ability to export georegistered snippet samples with AVG applied to allow for gridding in other packages, like Qimera or Fledermaus.

• Support for EdgeTech 6205 sonars. You will need to manually set the Sonar Type in the Processing Parameters > Sonar Defaults tab and use Custom Override All. This should be done before importing the source files to save re-extracting the coverage.

• Support for Kongsberg EM2042 sonars.

• Support creating a multispectral image with only 2 bands.

Bugs

• Processing / Source Files

  • Frequency used in processing is now displayed properly in the Beam Pattern viewer, ARA patch analyzer, and in the ARA creation.

  • Fixed .kmall dual swath loading for single and dual head systems. This has an improvement in resolution for small features.

  • Fixed a bug where the snippet sample lookup relative to the central sample was incorrect, resulting in small loss of resolution for finer features.

  • Fixed an issue when viewing raw Norbit snippets.

  • Fixed an issue when viewing raw Kongsberg beam average intensities.

  • Updated the lookup of absorption coefficients for Kongsberg systems to use the values reported in the sector packet headers per ping. This would only have affected EM2040 users who were attempting to correct for errors in data entry of the absorption in real-time. This improvement was only necessary for .all and .gsf formats, the .kmall format was not affected.

  • Fixed an across track scaling issue when pairing with HDCS data.

  • Read and apply HDCS ping flags.

  • Fixed a depth resolution issue when creating GSF files during import pairing.

  • Fixed a depth corrector issue when pairing with HDCS files.

  • Support dB offsets for Kongsberg Very Shallow mode

  • Fixed an issue with the ARA layers having an incorrect histogram resulting in a mis-match between the display and histogram.

  • Fixed an issue with Norbit normalized backscatter absorption values being read as 0.

  • Fixed an issue in the pairing file selection if there were more bathy files than snippet files or vice versa.

  • Fixed an issue when pairing R2S and Hypack GSF files when snippets are missing.

  • Fixed an issue with noisy beam average values when pairing R2S and Hypack GSF files.

• Other

  • Changed the HIPS Licensing version selection to be either CARIS 9 / 10 or CARIS 11 / 12 licensing.

  • Improved the speed of the multispectral image creation dialog.

  • Added mosaic name to the status bar to make it clear which mosaic the mouse value came from.

Known Issues

• Due to the change in internal backscatter file storage size (made smaller), if you open a project from a previous version of FMGT (version 7.10.3 or earlier) you will need to manually clear the Adjust flag to continue with new processing, such as Mosaic, Statistics / Grid, or ARA layers. This is done by clicking on the Manual Processing tab > hitting the Clear Flags button, checking the Adjust checkbox and selecting OK. Similar items like patch selection will not work without clearing the Adjust flag.