Contacts are representations of features on the sea bottom that are visible in the sonar data. They are added to the data using the Side Scan Editor. Information about the contacts in a project can be exported into the file formats described here.
Contacts are created in the Side Scan Editor waterfall view, and saved in the *.hips file.
When you export contacts, a set of output files are produced that represent all contacts from all of the survey lines in your project.
The Contact export function from SIPS produces four files:
• filename_ContactLine.txt contains information identifying the survey line and indexes to the other files.
• filename_ContactSingle.txt contains all the information for single point contacts.
• filename_ContactMulti.txt contains all information for single point contacts.
• filename_ContactMultiPoints.txt contains all location information for multipoint contacts.
• filename_ContactTiff.gat contains all image files created during export.
These files can be saved in the line folder, or to a folder you specify, and will use the file name you set during export.