The objective of the ISACS project is to prove the feasibility of the analysis and characterization of the seafloor by exploiting and integrating data gathered from commercially available sonar equipment. This has applications in geotechnical engineering, the offshore industry, archaeological research, as well as environmental research and monitoring.

The four main areas in terms of quantitative characterization are: (1) the layering of the upper seafloor strata, including location, dipping and roughness parameters, (2) quantitative (compressional wave velocity and attenuation, density) and qualitative (sand- silt-gravel) of the different layers, (3) localization and identification of buried and partially buried objects (pipelines, cables, toxic waste etc) and (4) 3D volumetric imaging of the upper strata.

The work at SIPLAB-Faro concentrates on the 3D interpolation and segmentation of bottom-penetrating sonar data plus volumetric and surface (triangulated segmentation) rendering.