Akoostix announced a number of significant achievements as it moved into its fourth year of business. The business is strong and growing for the third year in a row, with excellent prospects for the future.
Some significant achievements include:

• The competitive win of a Standing Offer with Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC – Atlantic) to support R&D related to the Software Tools for Analysis and Research (STAR) and Signal Processing Packages (SPPACS) that Akoostix has supported since inception. This contract brings together a strong team of subcontractors, and will allow the Akoostix led team to support a wide variety of research initiatives. Some of the more interesting work includes:
  • Better integration of classification features for improved tracking and contact-track association.
  • Development of smart automation tools that couple intuitive data displays, user cueing, and semi-automated detection, data fusion, and tracking.
• Akoostix was also very proud to deliver on the first iteration of a plug-in software framework for automated mine detection using sidescan sonar. This framework will enable researchers to use a variety of sonar data formats to test a variety of detection, fusion, and classification (future upgrade) algorithms.
• An Akoostix led team also delivered a detailed literature review to the LASSO project. This review composed of over 390 articles from a variety of sources enabled the team and DRDC to quickly ramp up on the state of the art in overland acoustics.
• Akoostix made significant progress in developing Marine Mammal Mitigation (MMM) tools this year. In December they delivered a detection module to the PAMGUARD team under a JIP project. This project included participation in a JIP hosted international symposium in Houston, TX, and resulted in presentations related to MMM and PAM at the International Sonobuoy Interoperability Conference (ISIC) in Washington, DC. Akoostix continues to work in this domain with DRDC, supporting various development and analysis contracts, and working as a subcontractor as they complete a review of Active Acoustic Monitoring (AAM) systems that might be useful for detection of non-vocalising marine mammals.
• Flexible, cross-platform sonar processing tools developed by Akoostix for DRDC are now integrated with the DRDC Northern Watch, Rapidly Deployable Systems (RDS), and Networked Autonomous Localisation System (NetALS) projects, and are in use at the Acoustic Data Analysis Centre (ADAC) and at the Canadian Forces Experimental Test Range (CFMETR). These tools allow users to perform passive processing and beamforming for virtually any time and frequency resolution on MS Windows, Linux and OSX platforms.

Work performed this year resulted in new records for both sales and revenue along with work in two new domains (minehunting and overland acoustics). The team looks forward to another banner year, as the standing offer enables new work to commence earlier than ever.