Acoustic mapping and monitoring of the seabed: From single-frequency to multispectral multibeam backscatter

With the increasing human activities in the marine environment, such as fisheries, dredging, coastal protection or construction of marine infrastructure, seabed sediment and habitat mapping have become highly relevant for the development of sustainable marine management strategies. Compared to traditional mapping methods, primarily based on bed...

Mapping the seabed and shallow subsurface with multi-frequency multibeam echosounders

Multi-frequency multibeam backscatter (BS) has indicated, in particular for fine sediments, the potential for increasing the discrimination between different seabed environments. Fine sediments are expected to have a varying signal penetration within the frequency range of modern multibeam echosounders (MBESs). Therefore, it is unknown to...

Monitoring underwater nourishments using multibeam bathymetric and backscatter time series

Natural and man-induced coastal erosion endanger life and environment in coastal areas worldwide. For sedimentary barrier coasts, beach and underwater nourishments are an efficient coastal protection strategy. To optimize nourishments and to understand their impact on the marine environment, monitoring strategies are required. In this study,...

A multispectral bayesian classification method for increased acoustic discrimination of seabed sediments using multi-frequency multibeam backscatter data

Multi-frequency backscatter data collected from multibeam echosounders (MBESs) is increasingly becoming available. The ability to collect data at multiple frequencies at the same time is expected to allow for better discrimination between seabed sediments. We propose an extension of the Bayesian method for seabed classification to multi...

Assessing the repeatability of sediment classfication method and the limitations of using depth residuals

Knowing the morphology and sediment composition of the seabed is of high importance for various applications. In this contribution, the repeatability of acoustic seafloor classification (ASC) results obtained from MBES backscatter value is investigated. The unsupervised classification algorithm based on Principal Component Analysis has been...