QTC DEEP - A ROV-Mounted Single Beam Acoustic Seabed Classification System for High-Resolution Mapping

For single-beam acoustic seabed classification from ship-mounted echosounders, the beam footprint on the seafloor is often smaller than the spatial scale of seabed variability. In deep water, the beam footprint on the seafloor from a ship-mounted sounder is quite large, inhibiting mapping of seabed variability. To mitigate this problem, a high-resolution deep-sea acoustic seabed classification system, QTC DEEP, was developed by adapting and applying Quester Tangent Corporation (QTC) acoustic seabed classification technology, known as QTC VIEW Series 4, together with a pinger electronics package mounted together inside a pressure-housing on board a remotely operated vehicle. This paper presents the classification of seafloor echo return data from three sites on the British Columbia coast to demonstrate the utility of QTC DEEP .