Flooded coal mine in West Bengal, India

Steve Van Meter

Steve Van Meter is one of the worlds most experienced underwater investigation consultants using VideoRay MicroROV’s. Steve travels to destinations in all parts of the globe from his base in Florida, USA. Investigations covers all type of inspections, from searching for missing bodies to inspection of perished oil tankers.

In September 2008, Steve was commissioned by the Indian Institute of Technology to map an abandoned coal mine in a village located 250 km NW of Kolkata. The mine had been abandoned for some time and needed to be filled with sand to avoid the risk of ground-sinking, that could endanger the village built on top of the mine. Before starting the fill, it was vital to inspect and map the whole mine, no reliable drawings existed. Using divers to do the inspection was not an option due to the dangers involved.

Steve Van Meter lowers the VideoRay into the mine

Apart from the more practical issues, like sufficient power and working in very high temperatures, the biggest challenge was the access to the mine. The only access was a 50 meter deep and 35 cm wide bore hole. Steve was using a VideoRay Pro3, which he managed to lower into the hole to reach the actual mine 50 meters below. The ROV was equipped with a sonar and a LYYN T38™ real-time video enhancement unit.

”The combination of a sonar and the LYYN unit worked very well together and allowed me to quickly map the mine and at the same time get good video images of the conditions of the tunnels.

The latter was important for the decisions later on of the best way to fill the mine in an efficient way. Without the LYYN unit it would have taken much longer time and without the good video images it would be more difficult to decide how to continue. After using the LYYN technology for over 2 years I am very happy with it and I never go on a job without it”, says Steve.

Some original footage from the inspection, filmed through Steve’s LYYN T38:

[See post to watch Flash video]

The SubSea industry has had to foster innovation in order to face the world’s most challenging environment. But, innovation has not always been synonymous with industry wide acceptance. The industry has, and to a large extent still are, dependent on divers. But that is very limited to shallow waters and limited operation times, and is still very dangerous.The solution is underwater vehicles, manned or remotely operated with remote vision through real-time video.

The introduction of the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) only came about as the industry understood the possibilities that the new technology delivered. Through the years the spectrum of ROV tasks has steadily grown and today it is the workhorse of SubSea operations. But, the industry must now face new challenges as its rapid expansion into deeper water and hasher environments pushes resources and current technology to the limit. To meet this challenge new concepts of operations and novel solutions are required.

This is where LYYN® comes in. LYYN provides enhanced visibility to the remote operations. In real-time. Shortening operation times. Increasing quality of inspections and documentation. Pushing the usage of underwater video.

LYYN’s primary SubSea applications:

Inspection

In the past, inspecting under water was a difficult and expensive operation. The diver was often working in dark and turbid water and had to contend with currents, making it a particularly hazardous job. Today more and more companies are using ROVs to perform these inspections. Having an ROV allows them to perform an inspection whenever they want.

In order to do this, water and environmental conditions must be established for the inspection. Of course, the inspector will want to find the clearest water and the least current possible for the inspection. But if the case is not a ship you can move to the most favorable conditions you are stuck with what Mother Nature provides. And the visibility is what it is. Or even worse, if you happen to stir up silt. This is where LYYN™ products can make an important contribution.

By reducing visibility problems you will get results where you would not without LYYN. This means higher quality in the inspection result, reducing inspection time and costs. Drastically.

Underwater archeology

There are many reasons why underwater archeology can make significant contributions to our knowledge of the past. Some individual shipwrecks are of significant historical importance either because of the magnitude (such as the Titanic), or circumstances (Housatonic was the first vessel in history sunk by an enemy submarine). Shipwrecks can also be important for archeology because they can form a kind of accidental time capsule, preserving a collection of human artifacts at the moment in time when the ship was lost.

Underwater sites are difficult to access, and more hazardous, compared to working on dry land. In order to access the site directly, diving equipment and diving skills are necessary. The depths that can be accessed by divers, and the length of time available for inspection, are limited. For deep sites beyond the reach of divers, submarines or remote sensing equipment are needed.

Visibility may be poor, because of sediments or algae in the water or lack of light. This means that survey techniques that work well on land generally cannot be used effectively under water. This is where LYYN™ products can make an important contribution.

Underwater Sciences, like geology, biology and environmental studies

A large amount of all life on Earth exists in the oceans. Exactly how large the proportion is still unknown. While the oceans comprise about 71% of the Earth’s surface, due to their depth they encompass about 300 times the habitable volume of the terrestrial habitats on Earth. Large areas beneath the ocean surface still remain effectively unexplored.

ROVs with cameras are rapidly becoming the standard non-invasive imaging tool for marine biologists. An ROV allows many more people to participate in the exploration of the deep sea while remaining in a safer environment. This high tech, motorized underwater camera has the ability to “swim” along the ocean bottom at any depth, allowing the scientists to closely observe the plant and animal life there. And it does not produce bubbles that scare fish. But because of turbidity and other visibility problems of the sea it is sometimes difficult to get quality data from the study. That is, if you are not using a LYYN™ real-time video enhancer.

Inshore inspection

The ROV technology has proven its durability and versatility in missions around the globe. And now, with the commonly used micro ROV, inspectors can access tight places that are inaccessible or hazardous to divers. In even smaller spaces ruggedized micro and fiber optic cameras are used commonly.

Every detail can be scrutinized. As long as there is visibility enough for a quality result. Better and better lights are mounted on the ROV or camera increasing usability. But sometimes this is not enough. The water might be so turbid that the strong light just creates overexposed “milk”. Strong tinting of the water might obscure the surfaces you are supposed to inspect. And how do you distinguish a corroded crack from the rest of the corroded surface?

There are many customer cases verifying that you can push the limits of the underwater inspection technologies a few steps further by plugging in a LYYN™ unit in the existing video system. The result is reduced visual disturbances from particles or algae, removed predominant tinting from organic matter or minerals and increasing contrast in surface colors.

Search & Rescue (SAR) and Security

The use of  camera systems for search and recovery operations is growing since it is often more efficient that using divers. Especially when speed is of the essence, diver down- time can be a limiting factor and the operation is too dangerous to use human intervention.

The growing need to secure ports and waterways also increases the use of camera systems.

For both these applications increasing visibility can be a significant contributor to success of the mission.

Aquaculture

The use of cameras in the Aquaculture market is rapidly growing and fish farms are constantly looking at more cost effective means of monitoring their fish and feed residues.  Environmental aspects on fish farming are increasing and legislation is more and more demanding video documentation of the sea bottom.

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The key to successful underwater vision is getting rid of the water! This cliché is as old as underwater photography itself, but it’s still true today. Depth, distance, lighting, turbidity of the water, salinity, and pollution all contribute to the visibility, and the perception of size, shape, and color of underwater objects. Adding the abilities and limitations of the human eye and brain makes this a very challenging environment. However, technological development is rapidly pushing the limits of what we can see and do underwater.

Water vs. air

Water is 800 times denser than air. When light enters water, it interacts with the water molecules and particles, resulting in loss of light intensity, color changes, diffusion, loss of contrast and other effects. If you take an underwater photo of an object one meter away, it will be similar to a photo above water at 800 meters; both will look bluish and lack contrast.

Light under water

ROV inspection of a pipeline in highly turbid water where the center of the image has been lyynified

Sun light is reflected by the surface of the water, which causes significant changes in visibility and the perception of color underwater. Depending on waves light may form patterns or become randomly diffused. The amount of light reflected also depends on the geographical location, the time of day, weather conditions, the season and the condition of the sea.

If you descend more than a couple of meters you will need to bring your own light source. Unfortunately, lamps tend to have a ‘hot spot’, resulting in an image with a very bright center becoming darker towards the edges.  In turbid waters a camera sensor will be almost blinded by the reflections at the center while the edges appear very dark. So the ideal camera should have a highly dynamic low-light sensor reducing the need for high-power illumination.

Or – you could use electronic video enhancement technology like lyynification™ from LYYN®.

Color under water

An important part of vision underwater is being able to distinguish different colors, or actually specific wavelengths of light being reflected off objects and picked up by the eye or the camera sensor. Different wavelengths are absorbed differently as the light passes through the water. The shorter the wavelength, the deeper (longer) it will reach before being absorbed. This causes objects to lose their color as you go deeper down or further away.

Weeds, rocks, animals and man-made objects generally appear to have the same color as the depth or viewing range increases. Objects become distinguishable only by differences in brightness and not color. Contrast becomes the most important factor in visibility, and even very large objects may be undetectable if their brightness is similar to that of the background.

Part of the image lyynified, bringing out the beauty of the reef

Water depth is not the only factor effecting the filtering of colors. Salinity, turbidity, the size of suspended particles, and pollution all affect the color-filtering properties of water. For instance, plankton absorbs purples and blues. So the presence of plankton would cause blue and purple objects to lose their colors much faster than red and yellow objects.

Humans on-site can make some ad­justment, psychological in part, which allows divers to perceive some of the warm colors of the coral reef. But camera sensors have no ability to compensate for the blue/green filtering of sea water. This is why the fantastic colors of the reef appear cold and lifeless when you look at your holiday photos or videos at home.

Turbidity and contrast

The center part is lyynified, clearly showing the details of a wreck

Bright particles in water reflect and scatter light, resulting in diffusion. Sometimes, diffusion is helpful because it sheds light on areas that would otherwise be in shadow. Normally, however, diffusion interferes with vision because the backscattering reduces the contrast between an object and its surroundings.

The loss of contrast resulting from diffusion and loss of color spectrum are the major reasons why vision underwater is so much more restricted than it is on land.

Underwater photographers have been battling with these problems since the early days. One can use different filters to try to compensate for the loss of a particular wavelength, or the white-balancing feature on video cameras that tries to compensate for the color cast. But all these traditional methods are very crude with severe limitations.

LYYN technology

The revolutionary method of lyynification™ takes a different approach.  Each video frame is optimized for contrast and color spectrum to make it as “natural” as possible to the human eye. Even the smallest fragments of color and object shape can be extracted from the camera sensor to restore the scene as much as possible. And all this is done in real-time. The result is an image that constantly self-adjusts to the environment, and the diver or ROV pilot can focus on mission objectives.

Over the years SeaBotix and Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) has collaborated on the design and development of a set of systems that were in need by the Swedish Armed Forces’ EOD unit.  The requirement for the systems was the need to have a ROV ability to survey underwater environments in order to localize explosive charges on ship hulls, quays, bridge foundations and other areas.  Use of a small ROV was deemed preferable to divers from a personal safety point of view and the more enduring method of survey.

There were many requirements set forth in the development of a solution including portability, ease of operation, capability, versatility and integration.  Among them the integrated LYYN™ video enhancer.

Read the full Case Story: Swedish EOD and SeaBotix.

When a hull inspection is required – such as the two inspections of the outer hull of all sea-going vessels required every five years by the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) and the US Coast Guard (USCG) – the solution is normally an expensive drydock trip. One of these two inspections can be carried out underwater while the vessel is afloat, a so-called Underwater Inspection in Lieu of Drydocking (UWILD) survey.

Divers can often accomplish the task, but ROVs are ideal due to their thoroughness and detailed recordkeeping, not to mention the speed with which inspections can be carried out, which is becoming important due to the increasing number of ships that need to be inspected.

SeaVision Marine Services LLC recently completed two UWILD inspections on vessels operated by one of the major off shore support vessel companies in the Gulf of Mexico that are homeported in the brown waters of Port Fourchon.

“We used two inspection class ROVs from SeaBotix, in which the Integrated Control Console was equipped with LYYN™ image enhancement boards. The LYYN™ visual enhancement was critical to the overall performance. Even after traveling thirty miles off shore we only had about 5 to 8 feet of visibility, but the LYYN™ unit really helped to clear up the imagery.”

Read the full Case Story: SeaVisionMarine Services, Hull inspection

This series of video-clips were taken by ECA’s K-Ster ROV during trials.

K-Ster is a low-cost, easy to launch, one-shot mine disposal vehicle. An inert version is also available for training, demonstration or inspection tasks both in the military and civilian sectors (oil and gas industry). K-Ster is designed to operate from both dedicated and non-dedicated platforms, at ranges out to 1000 meters, in depths down to 300 meters.

Automatically guided towards the target, K-ster is fitted with both sonar and color camera for target identification. It has a unique tiltable warhead containing an insensitive explosive to attack mines accurately and efficiently and is effective against moored, bottom and partially buried mines.

The four clips were lyynified™ after the trials and clearly show how LYYN technology can enhance visibility and aid the identification process.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Published courtesy of ECA,

©2008 ECA S.A. all rights reserved.

The first two clips come from a live test of the LYYN T38™ recorded on board DeepOceans “Normand Flower”.

The LYYN T38™ was plugged directly into the Sea Owl ROV system, with no other alterations to the system. You can see the operator testing different levels of lyynification™ in different selections.

The following clips are all post processed ROV video footage from different day-to-day tasks, like pipe inspection.

The general conclusion of the tests are that the LYYN T38™ performed very well, especially in close up (<8m) inspection and engineering work.

Published courtesy of DeepOcean A/S,
©2006 DeepOcean A/S, all rights reserved