Before we discuss the specifics of the BlueView Subsea Oculus sonar, let's take a brief look at how multibeam sonar images are created, to help understand how we can get the best images using the tools available. If you are familiar with sonar image interpretation, you can skip this page and the next.

Here we see a simple underwater scene with a short cylinder, a taller cube behind it and something that looks like a pipe coming out of the ground from its lower right and then bending down to the left. We will assume the sonar is at the bottom of the image and slightly higher above the bottom than the cube is tall.

The image creation process begins with an acoustic pulse from the sonar head. As a multibeam sonar, the Oculus actually emits 512 focused beams simultaneously, so the pulse is really an array of many pulses. As the pulse proceeds outwards, the beams attenuate, losing energy, as represented in this image by the thinning bands. Also, at some point, parts of the pulse encounter our objects. When they encounter an object, they are reflected in various directions.

The sonar switches to listening mode in order to process these reflections into an image.