Mitcham Industries announced its Klein Marine Systems unit received a contract from a leading autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) manufacturer to install its MA-X technology on a next gen system for evaluation by the U.S. Navy.

MA-X represents a cost-effective gap-filler solution that has long been sought by the industry. Traditional side scan sonar imaging creates a nadir gap in the center of the image. By removing this gap, MA-X eliminates the need for overlapping survey lines time to achieve 100% coverage. 

For the operators of AUV's, this translates into extended mission duration, or shorter time to cover the same area.  One of the key discriminators of MA-X, particularly for the defense sector, is the ability to produce high-quality imagery of the nadir area that is comparable to the traditional side scan.  This allows for the data acquired from MA-X to be fed directly into existing automatic target recognition ("ATR") software allowing for automated detection and recognition of targets of interest.