The ABCS Program for the Analysis of Echo Sounder Returns for Acoustic Bottom Classification.

Abstract : An echo sounder can be used to indicate the type of sediment on the sea floor through analysis of the returned echo's shape and energy characteristics. This document describes the ABCS program written to analyze echo sounder ping returns for simple shape and energy statistics, with the intention to investigate which statistics are important in characterizing the seabed. ABCS was written in Visual Basic and can read in the data produced by the Echo Listener device manufactured by Sonar Data Tasmania. Also discussed in this paper is the need to transform all the data obtained to a reference seafloor depth and the method used by ABCS to do this.