Advances in underwater acoustic video camera

Abstract

Beginning this year, as part of the Crossministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program, Next Generation Marine Resources Survey Technologies (Zipangu Plan for the Sea), tools for marine resources survey use will be developed. In this way, the world's first simple undersea work system that can be used for highly efficient sampling of seabed resources etc. will be built with, as its ultimate purpose, encouraging a great leap forward in the surveying of constituents of seabed resources and of their reserves etc. The authors are undertaking advanced research on underwater acoustic video cameras as part of their contribution to one of its themes, the development of an ROV based high-efficiency undersea work system. This ROV high-efficiency undersea work system is a mechanism that samples specimens by coring multiple points on a hard ocean bed. To make judgments about the location of the tip of the core cutter during coring, to clarify progress of the work, or to decide the next step, it is important to obtain visual information displayed in real time as three-dimensionally as images obtained by the human eye. So the authors have conducted advance research on acoustic video cameras to support underwater visibility, by developing acoustic image gathering technology that ensures visibility when the work has made the water turbid, and have also developed an image presentation method, in order to operate underwater machines.