@proceedings {6519, title = {Hydrographic Survey Validation and Chart Adequacy Assessment Using Automated Solutions}, year = {2019}, month = {March 18-21}, address = {Biloxi, MS, USA}, abstract = {

The rising trend in automation is constantly pushing the hydrographic field toward the exploration and the adoption of more effective approaches for each step of the ping-to-public workflow. However, the large amount of data collected by modern acquisition systems - especially when paired with the force multiplier factor provided by autonomous vessels - conflict with the increasing timeliness expected by today\’s final users. Such a situation represents a processing challenge for the largely human-centered solutions that are currently available, and the adoption of automated and semi-automated data quality procedures seems the only scalable and long-term solution to the problem. At the same time, there is an inherent value in propagating the application of such procedures upstream in the survey workflow. In fact, capturing potential issues close (in time and space) to their occurrence has the advantages of reducing the efforts required for their solution and limiting their extent. As such, modern surveys should rely more and more on robust data quality procedures that are applied in near real-time.

With the challenge to automate and standardize a large portion of the quality controls used to analyze hydrographic data, NOAA\’s Office of Coast Survey and the UNH Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping have jointly developed (and made publicly available) a pair of software solutions - QC Tools for quality control and CA Tools for chart adequacy - that collect algorithmic implementations for a number of these tasks. Their aim is to verify whether the acquired data satisfy the adopted agency standards (and, in a more general sense, fit for the intended purpose). These standards usually focus on data quality aspects like data density, coverage, and uncertainty evaluation which are largely automated by the developed tools discussed in this paper, leaving to the experienced hydrographer the duty to review the results and supervise the validation process. After an overview of the tools (and the relevant recent improvements driven by field feedback), this work focuses on a new chart adequacy algorithm as well as an experimental approach for bathymetric anomaly detection and classification. A number of examples that use the publicly available solutions in real-world scenarios are also illustrated.

}, keywords = {automated solutions, ca tools, chart adequacy, hydroffice, hydrographic survey validation, qc tools}, doi = {10.13140/RG.2.2.28983.57761}, url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331966330_Hydrographic_Survey_Validation_and_Chart_Adequacy_Assessment_Using_Automated_Solutions}, author = {Giuseppe Masetti and Tyanne Faulkes and Christos Kastrisios} }