Volume 18 HYDROACOUSTICS USAGE OF THE GSTREAMER FRAMEWORK FOR THE GENERATION, ANALYSIS, PROCESSING AND VISUALIZATION OF SONAR SIGNALS KRZYSZTOF CZARNECKI, DORIAN DĄBROWSKI Gdansk University of Technology Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics Department of Marine Electronic Systems Narutowicza 11/12, 80-233 Gdańsk, Poland
[email protected] In this paper, the usage of the GStreamer framework in applications of classical digital signal processing is discussed. Especially, its adaptation regarding sonar technique is presented here. Signal generation, analysis, processing, and visualization are implemented as GStreamer plugins. The new plugins and the structure of data transmitted through the GStreamer pipeline are both briefly discussed. The introduced plugins are published as free software under the GROJ project. INTRODUCTION The need for an open software platform given over to application development is evident. Moreover, technical support, the availability of documentation, and a lack of dependence on the hardware and operating system is desirable here. Essentially, the benefit of using such a platform is source code portability, software standardization, and finally, cost reduction in the development process. These requirements are fulfilled by The GStreamer framework (GSF) [1] and The GNU Radio Toolkit [2,3], amongst others. The considerations in this paper are focused on the GSF and its use in the analysis and processing of sonar chirp signals. GStreamer is an open source multiplatform framework originally dedicated to the stream- ing and processing of multimedia data. It is known to work on Linux, Solaris, Microsoft Win- dows, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and many other popular operating systems. It is also widely em- ployed as an engine for many multimedia applications, such as media players and capture en- coders, for example: Banshee, Kaffeine, Rhythmbox, Sound Juicer, Totem and so on.