Lossless compression method for ASCII UTM format sea survey data obtained from multibeam echosounder

Data gathered through seabed surveys performed using multibeam echosounder tend to be significant in size. Quite often a single measurement session leads to obtaining even several million distinct points (usually in x, y, z format). These data are saved in files (often text files), where x, y represent the location of a point (in geographical format, or more commonly in UTM format) and z represents the measured depth at the respective point. Due to the huge amount of such points, the data occupy a significant space in memory or in storage system (the order of megabytes for small areas and of gigabytes for larger ones). The paper contains a survey of existing methods of compressing ASCII UTM files and a proposal of a novel method tailored for a particular data structure. As a result of utilising differential coding and coding using varying length values, the size of such files can be diminished by a factor exceeding ten, while preserving the full information. The paper presents a detailed description of the proposed algorithm and experimental results using real data.