Page 36: of Marine Technology Magazine (March 2015)

Instrumentation (Credit: : K. Morris)

The NOC Autosub6000 being recovered onto the deck after a successful mission.

roll, recorded from the vehicle and re-scaled so that each pixel

The Future of AUV Photography within each image represented the same area. As climate change and growing human activity intensi? es

Using the positions of the images, it was then possible to the pressure on sea? oor resources, it is increasingly impor- work out the overlap and place them together in 10 image tant to better document deep sea marine biodiversity and eco- segments called tiles. Once these tiles were annotated for the systems. Technological advances such as deep-sea ROV and presence and size of animals, the positions, length and identi- AUV systems have allowed us to begin accessing areas which ? cation of individual animals were recorded, creating a map were previously not possible. As these systems advance, there of biodiversity on the sea? oor. is an increased ability to cover even larger areas and develop “This technology is important because it allows us to create more advanced mapping tools.

an image of the deep-sea over large areas, almost like a google “It is hoped that there will be an increase in automation both street view. This is done in a cost effective manner using the in the image processing and in the image annotation. Auto-

AUV, meaning that the ship can be collecting other samples at mated annotation is something that would allow us to process the same time,” Dr. Morris said. “From these images, we get the images and obtain results quicker; this is currently being an insight into the deep-sea environment on scales not previ- worked on by some colleagues in Germany,” said Dr. Morris. ously possible, which will enhance our understanding of that While this technique was developed to map the distribution and environment and our impact on it.” biodiversity of remote deep-sea communities, there are many

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