Comparison of an EKF based Processing System with a Standard Hydrographic Software Tool using a Low Cost Bathymetric Multi Sensor Platform

Surveying in shallow waters play a crucial role in mapping harbour areas, coastal habitats and natural environments in coastal and inland waters. In order to enforce the market of survey systems a low cost Multi Sensor System has been developed and together with it the work flow of processing the Single Beam echosounder data that is recorded. The recorded data of the MSS was processed using an extended Kalman Filter and estimating the state of the system for each time epoch. In the light of multiple options of processing on the market available however, a second attempt to process the acquired MSS data was approached which is to store the hydrographic data as a generic sensor format and therefore be able to perform the necessary post processing steps via a commercially available hydrographic processing software. A comparison between the two methods of processing was therefore made and the results show a non-significant advantage in favour of the original post processing method with an extended Kalman Filter. It is assumed that due to the approach of integrating a sensor network into the processing steps the processing quality of the Kalman Filter tops those of a manual post processing activity after generating a generic sensor format file. However, lacks of continuous data sets and a rather unreliable method of determining a reference value to compare with lead to the conclusion that this subject is a matter of further investigation.