3D imaging of seabed from electronic chart bathymetric data

Application of 3D imaging and mapping of seabed is very attractive in many areas including marine cartography, navigation. hydrography, GIS systems etc. There are two competing approaches to constructing 3D images of seabed. The first, off-line method, utilizes the bathymetric information extracted from vectorized digital navigational charts. The second one, on-line technique, employs multibeam sonar seabed echo records processing, The paper describes procedures of bathymetric data analysis for the first method along with newly proposed rendering schemes.