Stereoscopic visualization and contour mapping of the sea bed using a bathymetric sidescan sonar (BASS)

Besides the backscattered amplitude measurements of a conventional sidescan sonar, the Bathymetric Sidescan Sonar (BASS) makes simultaneous measurements of the depth of sea bed throughout the sidescanned area. It does this by determining the angle of the returning wavefront at each instant in time and combining the result in an appropriate manner with the range measurement. The depth information be used to generate contour maps. It can also be used to generate stereoscopic images of the sea bed. A potential cause of major errors in the depth measurement is surface multipath interference and special features are introduced into the transducer design to avoid this.