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

英国和国际政府需要了解人类活动对深海生态系统的影响，以便就如何为子孙后代保护和维护深海生态系统做出明智的决定。特别是，深水珊瑚礁可以被认为是生物活动的热点，为深度达2000米的各种海洋生物群落提供了丰富的栖息地。与此同时，深海珊瑚生长缓慢，需要数千年的时间才能形成这些珊瑚礁，它们非常脆弱，对环境的变化非常敏感。因此，如果不能保护它们不受拖网捕捞和工业活动的影响，可能不仅对珊瑚的分布，而且对它们所支持的海洋生物群落的分布产生不可逆转的影响。然而，监测活珊瑚的分布既昂贵又耗时。其主要原因是，虽然深水珊瑚稀疏地分布在一个大城市大小的区域，但需要观察以可靠地识别它们的特征是厘米级的。此外，颜色通常用于区分健康的活珊瑚和死珊瑚，这意味着通常需要使用水下摄像机进行直接视觉观察。不幸的是，在水下拍摄图像需要配备摄像头和强大照明系统的车辆在距离海底一两米的范围内运行。由于在海底附近运行的车辆需要避开障碍物，因此它们只能以人类步行速度的五分之一左右行驶。除了这些限制，虽然图像可以告诉我们是否存在活珊瑚，但还需要更先进的3D成像方法来告诉我们有多少珊瑚，这对于监测珊瑚丰度变化非常重要。在这个项目中，我们将开发一种三维水下摄像系统，能够测量50%以上的海底活珊瑚的分布情况。比目前可能的要大一倍。该系统将使用一对高灵敏度摄像机、一个强大的闪光照明系统和一个脉冲激光器，在距离海底近10米（比通常高5倍）的范围内获得全色图像和高分辨率3D形状信息。能够从更远的地方拍摄高分辨率图像将增加单帧中可以观察到的区域，并允许水下航行器在更安全的高度运行，从而比以前更快地行驶。此外，通过3D相机系统获得的图像将被处理，以生成覆盖数百公顷（1公顷= 10，000平方米）区域的大型3D图像景观。这些景观将由使用水下航行器在数天内获得的数十万张海底图像组成。这些景观将为科学家提供丰富的，可探索的计算机生成的深海环境重建，他们可以用来可视化和研究活珊瑚分布的模式，这些模式在由数十万个原始图像帧组成的文件夹中不会立即明显。此外，重建将与现有的基于网络的界面兼容，这将使来自世界各地的科学家能够直接识别活珊瑚，并通过互联网测量其大小和分布。该项目开发的技术将使人们能够在以前不可能的空间尺度上研究活珊瑚的分布。通过几年的重访，拟议的传感器获得的高分辨率数据将有助于更好地了解海底发生的变化，并使我们的政府能够就保存和保护这些栖息地的最佳战略做出更明智的决定，而不会不必要地损害海洋中的商业和工业活动。

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.