ABSTRACT
A new technique of applying three-dimensional rendering to an integrated product of side-scan sonar, bathymetry and sub-bottom data in real time has been developed. The computer-generated products are displayed in stereo 3-D. The graphics workstation has become an indispensable problem-solving tool in the geophysical community. By joining analytical, computational, and graphics capabilities, workstations enable the creation of complex models and the interactive visualization of the models’ products. Side-scan sonars have been used to provide sonographs of the ocean floor since the early 1960s. This remote sensing device is subject to many radiometric and geometric distortions common to satellite remote sensing. A typical side-scan sonograph usually employs a grayscale for depicting the relative variations in return signal intensities. The sonograph pixels are not corrected for many radiometric and geometric distortions including speed, crabbing, yaw, slant range, and water column. Efforts to make sonographs a quantitative geological prospecting tool include efforts to “correct” pixel intensities for variations in slope and grazing angles.
