Real-time lossless compression of multibeam echosounder water column data

Abstract

Multibeam echosounders can generate vast amounts of data when recording the complete water column, which poses logistic, economic and technical challenges. Lossy data compression can reduce data size up to one or two orders of magnitude, but often at the expense of significant image distortion. Lossless compression ratios tend to be modest and at a high computing cost. In this work we test a high-performance data compression algorithm, FAPEC, initially developed for Space data communications with low computing requirements. FAPEC provides good compression ratios and supports tailored pre-processing stages. Here we show its advantages over standard and high-end lossless compression solutions currently available, both in terms of ratios and speed.