Underwater Pipeline and Cables Monitoring for Cusat

KOCHI:
Unmanned underwater vehicles need sophisticated image processing capabilities that must be efficient as well as robust. A project which is financially backed by Naval Research Board, Govt of India, under the title “Algorithms for Underwater Image Enhancement, Object Detection and Cable Tracking” is awarded to Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kalamassery.
The project will be executed in the Advanced Signal Processing and Instrumentation Research Lab(ASPIRE), Department of Electronics, Cochin University of Science and Technology under the Principal Investigation of Dr. Supriya M.H, Professor and Head of Department of Electronics. She is well versed in research projects dealing with the underwater domain. The project deals with the image enhancement of deep-sea underwater images, pipelines, cables and seafloor textures, through the use of cutting edge algorithms.
The project will try to deal with many challenges in dealing with images procured from deep sea area, where the visibility conditions are poor and colour and contrast conditions are deprived. The Co-Investigator of this project will be Arun. A. Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronics. A total grant of Rupees Thirty Lakh and Sixty Thousand has been awarded to the project by NRB.
The underwater image is inundated by reduced visibility conditions making images with deprived colour variation and contrast. The emphasis of this project lies primarily in the area of image processing and analysis of processed images. The image contrast enhancement, which is a method used to increase the visibility of images, can be performed using feature-based or intensity based methods.
Underwater pipelines and cables need to be constantly monitored to identify the damage caused to them due to earthquakes and other environmental changes. The constant monitoring of these pipelines and cables can be really helpful in avoiding devastating events like oil spills, gas leakages etc. Communication cables that are placed in the underwater area need to be constantly monitored for avoiding breaks in information flow. To accomplish this, an intelligent vision-based navigation and guidance system needs to be developed, which involves efficient methods for vision based target detection as well as tracking in an underwater environment. With the development of cutting-edge algorithms, systems can be designed with robust analytic capabilities.