Release 1.15.05 September 2016
16/09/2016
Bug Fixes
- Bug 273. Sound files in viewer data map. These were not being correctly catalogues in the datamap when using the PAMGuard viewer which meant that PAMGuard was not correctly loading sound data during offline analysis. This is now fixed.
- Bug 287. Slow database. This has been solved by setting the default behavior of the database to have Auto Commit set to ‘off’
- Bug 288. Fixed problem of missing help file image
- Bug 290. Click bearings on spectrogram display plug in were reversed if the first hydrophone was behind the second hydrophone in the configuration. This is now fixed so that it displays the same bearings as the main click detector display.
Target Motion Analysis
A major piece of work has been undertaken to improve the Target Motion tracking with PAMGuard. Details are available in the online help. Users of the Click Detector will notice the following changes:
- There is now a choice of least squares and Simplex based algorithms for real-time animal tracking. The improved algorithms also provide better error information both for display on the map and for storage in the database.
- The number of data streams associated with the click detector has been tidied up so that there are a) All Click, b) Tracked Clicks (those which are part of an event) and c) Events.
- When tracking online, all the click marking information is written to the same database tables as are used for offline target motion analysis. This means than when reviewing data offline, the tracks created in real time are now available for review and further analysis.
- A number of user options are now available for automatic click train identification and tracking.
- The automatic click train identification is now using the same internal structures as the manual tracking, so it’s possible to combine automatic and manual tracking.
- Improved options are available to the user, via the click detector bearing time display, to correct and relabel clicks / entire click trains.
Developers will hopefully find that the target motion code has been improved in a way which will make it much easier to provide target motion localization for other detection types (e.g. whistles) in the future.
Other Features
Logger Form Design
A GUI driven system for designing Logger forms has been released. Currently, this feature has no online help, but is reasonably intuitive compared to the old method of typing directly into the database.
Improved Number handling
Users have often found that PAMGuard can be “jumpy”, i.e. the spectrogram does not scroll smoothly, but pauses for a second every few seconds. This is caused by the Java garbage collector cleaning up unused objects in memory. With 64 bit versions, which allow for more memory, some of these pauses were becoming quite long (due to the increased amount of memory that needed to be cleaned up). In some circumstances, these pauses were making data acquisition systems unstable. We have therefore entirely rewritten the way in which PAMGuard handles arrays of spectrogram data (complex numbers) so that instead of large numbers of small Java objects there are now fewer, larger, simpler java objects. These reduce processing delays for garbage collection and give an overall speed improvement, but will otherwise not be noticed by users.
Click Detector RainbowClick file output
This feature has been removed since it has been obsolete for several years. Users should use the PAMGuard binary storage system for Click Detector data.
