Long-term and sustainable imaging of the underwater environments is crucial to marine sciences, sustainability, climatology, defense, robotics, geology, space exploration, and food security. SeaScan is the world's first energy-efficient underwater wireless 3D imaging system. It can capture color images with a few mJ of energy and operate on a coin cell battery for years. We show a 37x reduction in energy consumption compared to the lowest-energy state-of-the-art underwater imaging system.
SeaScan's ability to image underwater environments at such low energy opens up important applications in long-term monitoring for ocean climate change, seafood production, and scientific discovery.
How does SeaScan work?
At the core of SeaScan's design is a trinocular lensing system, which employs three ultra-low-power monochromatic image sensors to reconstruct color images. Each sensor is equipped with a different filter (red, green, and blue) to capture colors. The design introduces multiple innovations to enable reconstructing 3D color images from the captured monochromatic ones. 1) A Machine Learning based cross-color alignment architecture to combine the monochromatic images. 2) A cross-refractive compensation technique that overcomes the distortion of the wide-angle imaging of the low-power CMOS sensors in underwater environments.