What Is a Side-Scan Mosaic?

Use this when

You want to understand what a side-scan mosaic is before you generate one, or you need to explain what you are looking at after generation finishes.

What a side-scan mosaic is

Side-scan sonar sweeps a fan of sound to the left and right of the boat as it moves. Each sweep captures one thin strip of the bottom. A mosaic stitches those strips together in their correct geographic positions to produce a top-down image of the lakebed or riverbed — similar to aerial photography but built from sound returns instead of light.

The result is a single image where:

• Bright areas are hard, reflective bottom material.
• Dark areas are soft sediment, shadows, or depth transitions.
• The GPS track runs roughly through the center.

Every pixel in the mosaic corresponds to a real geographic location. You can export the mosaic as a KMZ for Google Earth or a GeoTIFF for desktop mapping software, and the image will land in the right place on the map.

When a mosaic helps

• You covered a large area and want to see the whole picture at once instead of scrubbing ping by ping.
• You need to share a map of bottom structure with someone who does not have HumVision.
• You want to compare the sonar survey to a nautical chart or satellite image.
• You are looking for a specific feature and want to orient yourself spatially before jumping to a timestamp.

When it does not help

• Short recordings with very little boat movement produce a narrow strip rather than a useful map.
• Recordings captured while drifting or idling at very low speed tend to produce smeared or streaked output because course-over-ground is unreliable at low speed.
• Recordings without Side Imaging channels cannot produce a mosaic at all — down-scan and 2D sonar channels are not used by the mosaic pipeline.
• A recording with poor or missing GPS data will fail to generate a useful mosaic even if the sonar data is good.