New in Echoview 3.50 for all users

Welcome to Echoview 3.50!

Echoview 3.50 continues to enhance your manipulation and visualization of data and streamline your workflow. A number of enhancements and features requested by specific individuals or organizations have been added and we hope they will prove to be of general use. Our favorite features are: the new setting that automatically applies calibration values from Simrad Ex60 .raw files; our new file management features; live viewing enhancements that allow 2D school detection in real time, selections and linked graphs to update when new data arrives during live viewing; ping by ping multibeam object detection and the variety of powerful new operators and operator enhancements.

New features are presented in two categories:

New features for all users
New features for users of specific echosounders

New features for all users

Feature

Benefit

Improved file management

New file management features which allow you to specify the default locations presented in various Open, Save, Import and Export dialog boxes and the folders in which Echoview will look for data files. Configure your favorite locations and save time during Echoview file interactions.

This significantly improves upon (and replaces) the Ignore data-file paths setting which was on the EV file page of the EV file properties dialog box earlier versions of Echoview.

Selections move or grow with new live viewing data

Rectangular selections now have the ability to advance or extend their vertical boundaries as live viewing data arrives. Graphs linked to moving selections will update as the selection advances or extends. This feature saves time during calibration runs and makes it easier to monitor data during live viewing.

View single targets and fish tracks in 3D scenes

Create 3D Single targets and 3D Fish tracks from single target echograms and view them in scenes. Use the advantages of navigating in time and space to see clearly what your fish are doing.

Ping by ping multibeam object detection A new By ping school detection algorithm is available which will create one 3D region for each object detected in each ping of multibeam data. This provides an alternative to the existing Multibeam target detection operator, conserving information about the shape of individual targets. 3D Region tracking can then be used to track individual targets from ping to ping.

New operators and operator enhancements

These new operators and enhancements to existing operators, increase the usefulness of virtual variables for your data processing and analysis.

  • A new Target samples bitmap operator produces a boolean mask based on single targets with which you can mask sample data (such as TS or Sv) to either highlight or remove (by negative the mask) the data which contributed to those single targets. This can be useful for:
    • visualization of the underlying sample data which represents single targets
    • removing the sample data of single targets before further analysis if desired
  • Introduced in Echoview 3.45, the Formula operator allows you to a create a mathematical equation that operates on the data values of a specified operand. In Echoview 3.50, we add two new Formula operator elements that return the sample range and the distance between pings. There are also enhancements that allow you to cut, copy and paste Formula operator elements.
    See About the Formula operator for more information.
  • A new GLCM texture feature operator that creates a virtual variable that represents the image texture of a single beam echogram. This operator offers the opportunity to use image analysis texture tools for the (experimental) classification of echogram data.
  • The new Vessel speed at pings operator creates an echogram where the values of all samples within a ping are set to the speed of the vessel at that ping. This gives you another way to differentiate pings when used with bitmap operators. It is also useful when you want to determine whether your data was acquired on station or on survey.
  • The operators Resample by distance interval and Resample by time interval now offer a weighted mean in the along-track direction. This enhancement compliments resample operator enhancements introduced in 3.45, such that true weighted means are now available.

    Note: These enhancements and those from Echoview 3.45 are in beta release.

  • The data range bitmap operator now accepts angular position variables. You can use the resulting bitmap to filter other data based on angular position measurements.

Two new operator features introduced specifically to aid in the removal of stationary background features from multibeam data:

  • Enhancements to the ping subset operator allow more choice in specifying ping ranges and introduce the ability to create a variable containing complementary pings to those that are specified.
  • A new Sample statistic subtract operator subtracts the average of one variable from each ping in another variable. This operator and the enhancements to the Ping subset operator were introduced primarily to support removal of stationary features in multibeam echograms. In this application stationary features and their ping ranges are identified in the echogram, then isolated by the Ping subset operator. The Sample statistic subtract operator's operands are the original multibeam variable and the virtual variable created by the Ping subset operator.

User interface enhancements

These enhancements give you more control over Echoview's workspace and makes your work easier by giving you easily accessible information about your data.

A very useful enhancement, when working with large data sets and/or long chains of virtual variables, is to press ESC to interrupt virtual variable calculations. This will save you time with respect to waiting for a calculation to finish (because you want to do something else) or just wanting to abort a calculation.

Scene enhancements

These enhancements give you more control over scenes, further aiding in data visualization.

  • Scene time limits are now automatically updated to ensure all objects in a scene can be scene (if the scene time window is fully open). This is particularly useful when objects are added to a scene or when objects are updated during live viewing. A manual override is still available on the Time Slider Properties dialog box.
  • Scene times and object times are now reported down to milliseconds. This enhances your ability to check the equivalence of objects in scenes when they are closely spaced in time.
  • A new Outline curtain border setting that improves scene visualization for echogram curtains with invisible elements.
  • Select the initial navigation mode for new scenes.

Cruise track enhancements

These enhancements will make your work with Cruise tracks easier:

New scripting features

Use new automated processing commands to save time.

  • For some tasks it is useful or necessary to modify an EV file before a run command itself is executed. Use the help file to find out why and how preactions are used in scripts. To streamline the preactions for setting variable and EV file properties a new script command has been introduced.

See Using the scripting module (deprecated scripting model for Echoview 5.0) for more information.

Support for new HAC tuple

Echoview now supports the reading and writing of the HAC split beam detected single target tuple.

SciFish Inc. are implementing support of this file format for their echosounders. Please contact SciFish for further details.

Note: The above file format is in beta release.

Extended salinity range for Sonar calculator

The Sonar calculator now accepts salinity values outside the valid range specified by the sonar calculator algorithms. In these cases, results are displayed with accompanying warnings.

Improved fish track detection

The following improvements to our fish track detection feature are:

  • Echoview no longer generates invalid fish track regions when single targets are closely spaced. All fish track regions detected using Echoview will now be valid.
  • Errors in the implementation of the fish track algorithm have been corrected (See Fish tracking algorithms for more information):
    • The weights in the fish tracking algorithm are now correctly applied. They were applied incorrectly in earlier versions of Echoview (in the denominator, not the numerator - their influence is now as expected, a higher weighting has greater influence than a lower weighting).
    • The TS and Ping Gap weighting terms are now correctly calculated. They were not squared (by Echoview) as documented in versions prior to Echoview 3.50.

Geotiff export times improved

Large Geotiff exports of scenes are now faster thanks to some performance enhancements in this area.

FastMM 4.46 memory manager Echoview now comes with the FastMM 4.46 compiled memory manager. FastMM 4.46 provides improved memory management for Echoview on your computer which enables Echoview to run faster, saving you time when you process large quantities of data.

Changes to Export variable names

To avoid the ambiguity that the term centroid can lead to, the 3D region metrics Centroid_latitude, Centroid_logitude and Centroid_depth are named Geometric_center_latitude, Geometric_center_longitude and Geometric_center_depth.

Documentation enhancements This help file, aside from documenting all these new features in detail also gained:

New features for users of specific echosounders

There may be specific new 3.50 features for your echosounder, please take a minute to check what's new!

BioSonics echosounders

DIDSON imaging sonars

Furuno echosounders

HTI echosounders

Kaijo echosounders

Kongsberg echosounders

Precision Acoustics echosounders

RD Instruments ADCP hardware

RESON echosounders

Simrad echosounders

See also

 Echoview Release History