The marine imaging workshop 2017 in Kiel was the second workshop of this kind, bringing together engineers, researchers regulators, and industrial partners who are involved in acquiring visual imagery in the marine realm. To represent the engineering side of this challenge, Dr Blair Thornton and Sophia Schillai travelled to the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel; Blair presented how he uses classical photography in combination with structured light from a laser to produce multi-hectare 3D Visual Maps that can be used to quantify the distribution of benthic organisms. Sophia brought a poster on the terrain following challenges for flight style AUV.
Besides presentations the workshop included several sessions for discussions on the future of marine imaging, giving a large and diverse platform to exchange what is important to those who use the data and where the challenges in aquiring and processing the data lie.
This was rounded off by a tour of the GEOMAR facilities, where on top of a diverse spectrum of research areas they were amused by the discovery of a museum model of the AUV ABYSS. It was made for a special exhibit, on of many ways how Germany involves the public in the science theme of 2017: The year of the oceans.
Shortly afterwards the annual VLC awayday conference brings together all students whose research is with the ECS group Vision, Learning, and Control (VLC). This includes several PhD students with FSI, but this year our group was also represented by Dr Blair Thornton giving the keynote. He showed how the often quite abstract research on Vision, Learning and Control is vital to getting a larger scale insight to the oceans. They cover 70% of our planet, but challenges from analysis of deep sea minerals to discovering deep-sea benthic ecosystems or monitoring the environment following disasters such as the Fukushima nuclear accident can only be solved at a large scale by applying advanced computational techniques.
PhD student Sophia completed the insight in the collaborative work between FSI and VLC by showing her work on improving the capability of flight style AUV, like Autosub6000 or BoatyMcBoatface from NOC, to stay close to complex terrains for photographic studies. Her presentation was awarded the runner-up award for the best presentation of the day.
