BioCam - Mapping of Benthic Biology, Geology and Ecology with Essential Ocean Variables

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The UK and international governments need to understand the effects of human activities on deep-sea ecosystems in order to make well informed decisions on how to protect and preserve them for future generations. In particular, deep-water coral reefs can be thought of a hotspot for biological activity, providing a rich habitat for diverse communities of marine life at depths of up to ~2000 m. At the same time deep-sea corals grow slowly, taking several thousands of years to form these reefs, are fragile and extremely sensitive to changes in the environment. As such, failure to protect them from trawling and industrial activities may have irreversible effects not only on the distribution of coral, but also on the distribution of the marine communities they support. However, monitoring of live coral distribution is expensive and time consuming. The main reason for this is that while deep-water corals are sparsely distributed over areas the size of a large city, the features that need to be observed to identify them reliably are on the scale of centimetres. Furthermore, colour is often used to tell apart healthy live coral from dead coral, which means that direct visual observation using underwater cameras is often necessary. Unfortunately, taking images underwater requires vehicles equipped with cameras and powerful lighting systems to operate within one or two meters of the seafloor. Since vehicles operating this close to the seafloor need to avoid obstacles, they can only travel at about a fifth of the speed people walk. In addition to these limitations, while an image can tell us if live coral is present or not, more advanced 3D imaging methods are needed to also tell us how much coral there is, which is important to know when monitoring changes in their abundance.In this project, we will develop a 3D underwater camera system that is capable of measuring the distribution of live coral on the seafloor over areas that are more than 50 times larger than is currently possible. The system will use a pair of highly sensitivity cameras, a powerful flashed lighting system and a pulsed laser to obtain full colour images and high resolution 3D shape information at a range of almost 10 m (~5 times higher than is typical) from the seafloor. Being able to take high-resolution images from further away will increase the area that can be observed in a single frame and also allow underwater vehicles to operate at safer altitudes and so travel significantly faster than previously possible. Furthermore, images obtained by the 3D camera system will be processed to generate large 3D image landscapes that cover areas of several hundreds of hectares (1 hectare = 10,000m2). These landscapes will each consist of several hundreds of thousands of images of the seafloor obtained over several days using an underwater vehicle. The landscapes will provide scientists with a rich, explorable computer generated reconstruction of deep-sea environments that they can use to visualise and study patterns in the distribution of live coral that would not be immediately obvious in a folder consisting of several hundreds of thousands of raw image frames. Furthermore, the reconstructions will be made compatible with existing web-based interfaces that will potentially allow scientists from all over the world to directly identify live coral and make measurements of their size and distribution over the internet. The technology developed in this project will allow live coral distributions to be studied over spatial scales that were not previously possible. By revisiting sites over several years, the high-resolution data obtained by the proposed sensor will help facilitate a better understand of the changes that take place on the seafloor, and allow our governments to make better informed decisions regarding the best strategies to preserve and protect these habitats without unnecessarily compromising commercial and industrial activities in the ocean.