Qimera Line Height Matching Tool

How to start

Height Matching Tool option of the Tools menu in the Main Menu bar.
Preexisting line and geographic selections will be used, but are not required.

What it does

The Height Matching Tool can work to vertically match unlocked lines, via an automated process, to neighboring lines that are either locked or have had an offset determined during the execution of the routine. It will resolve the offsets of all unlocked items using a Least Squares optimization, until all unlocked lines have been shifted. All locked lines will be considered, even if they are separate from each other geographically. The offset value between lines is calculated via footprints from each file that fall into common comparison cells.

The tool can also be used manually where, after double clicking in the Offset column for an unlocked line, a shift can be manually entered or changed with the mouse wheel.

Applied shift values, once saved, can be enabled, disabled, or reviewed in the Vertical Referencing tab of the Qimera Processing Settings Dialog.

General Description

Height Matching Main Application Window

The Height Matching Tool is meant to work in conjunction with the Qimera 4D Scene in the main Qimera application window. This is where the user selects appropriate spatial subsets of data to examine for the purposes of height matching.

Height Matching Selection Area

The selection area for the plot test is automatically configured on startup. It behaves just like the standard Rectangular Selection so you can use the handles to move or modify the shape. You can also use one of the movement shortcut keys (W, S, A, D) to move the selection to a new location. You can also use the Selection Dimensions Toolbar to more specifically control the size of the selection. The Selection Movement Toolbar is also available to move the selection but only the forward/back buttons are enabled.

Height Matching Plot Dock

This window displays the view of the soundings in the area selected. The selected area in the scene has an arrow that depicts the "view direction" of the soundings. These are then projected onto the plotting grid. As you move the Control Window offsets, the soundings are automatically shifted and their new position appears in the Plot Window. This window behaves like all the other plotting windows with Qimera. For more information on navigation within a plotting window, see the page on Qimera Plotting Grids.

The toolbar at the top of the window controls the view of the plot.

Explore Mode

This is the primary exploration mode of the tool. As you move your cursor over the plot, the label in the lower left of the window will update to show the current value.

Zoom Mode

When in zoom mode, simply click and drag an area of the plot to zoom into. Or hit the Home button to return to the full extents of the data. At any time, you can Shift-Click to drag the plot to a new location or use the middle mouse button. This is especially useful when you are zoomed in. You can always undo an edit using the Undo button.

Reset Zoom

If you have zoomed into an area of the plot, this button will zoom out to the extents of the currently viewed attribute.

Point Size

Clicking this button will incrementally change the size of the points and lines in your plot areas. If you click and hold the button, it will display a menu where you can select point sizes between Small and XX-Large.

Color By

Clicking the first of these icons will change the Color By mode of the points drawn in the widget. If you click and hold the button, it will display a menu where you can select the Color By option directly. The options for Color By are Vessel (shows default port/stbd color), File, System, Ping Counter (File Unique Ping Identifier), Ping Number (Source Ping Identifier), Beam, Selection Depth (scaled to depth range of the pings in the plot), Grid Color Map (depths colored by the color map of the currently selected Dynamic Grid), Intensity, Horizontal TPU, Vertical TPU and Solid Color. For LAS/LAZ files, there are also color by options for RGB and Classification. When Color By File is used, you will additionally see the matching colors appear next to the line name in the Project Sources Dock as show below. When Color By Solid Color is used, the Colormap Settings will be replaced by the Color Button.

Certain options will enable the color map button that allows selection or editing of color maps or the selection of a solid color. Some settings for Plot Color By do not allow access to a colormap, e.g. color by Vessel, File, System, Ping Counter (File Unique Ping Identifier), Ping Number (Source Ping Identifier), Beam and Grid Colormap.

Dock Options Menu

The view options allow you to configure what you see and how you see it in the sounding plot:

Show Grid Lines

Show/Hide the grid lines in your plot grids.

Show Soundings

This sub-menu allows you to change the visibility of rejected, filtered, normal, additional, interpolated or user picked soundings. Any changes to these options will be saved for the next time you perform height matching.

Export Offset as Text

Opens a dialogue for exporting the line names and offset values in the table in the control dock.

Export Plot as Image

Exports a screenshot of the plot.

Export Window as Image

Exports a screenshot Qimera. This option will redock the plot and control docks.

Export Scene as Image

Exports a screenshot of the work area.

Export All

Exports the four previous options to a folder.

Auto Export

This is a saved setting. If checked, Qimera will export all when the tool is closed.

Height Matching Control Window

The control widget shows a table of the items that can be height matched.

There are four columns in the table:

Source Item - the source item name
Plot Color - the color that is used for correlating data in the plot, in the source tree, and in the scene
Locked - check-boxes for each item to lock their offset and prevent further adjustment
Offset - the currently applied offset, this can be double clicked to modify

The toolbar at the top of the window controls .

On/Off

This button works the same as the Qimera Tools → Height Matching Tool menu option. It will turn the height matching widgets on or off.

UNKNOWN ATTACHMENT Save

This button will save the new offsets for each line. The offset applies to the entire line, not just the data in the selection. It will remain greyed out until a change is made to one of the files' offsets.

Auto Compute

This button will launch the Auto Compute routine. This is the routine that automatically computes the offsets for the unlocked lines.

Lock All

This will lock all items. One or more items should be unlocked to use Auto Compute.

Unlock All

This will unlock all items. This is handy after resetting all offsets to zero, for example.

Dock Options Menu

Save and Exit

Same behavior as the button on the toolbar. This options also closes the tool.

Revert All Offsets Changes

This will reset all offsets to the last save. You will be asked to verify this decision as you will lose all of your work.

Zero All Offsets

This will set all offsets to zero.

Auto Compute

This is the routine that automatically computes the offsets for the unlocked lines.