The Institutes research submersible PC–8

The Institute of Oceanology, Varna is affiliated to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The main research activities are focused on the field of coastal dynamics, marine physics, chemistry, geology, biology, ecology, and underwater investigations. Traditionally involved in all aspects of marine research it also offers consulting and expert services, environmental impact assessment studies, education and training.

The main fields of research can be summarized as follows:

• Coastal zone Hydrodynamics (wind wave in deep sea and shallow water, wind wave climate, wind wave modeling, statistical wind wave models), Lythodynamics (sediment transport, contemporary bottom changes, beach dynamics and cadastre) and Coastal zone management;
• Marine Physics (marine hydrology, water circulation, currents, hydrophysical aspects of marine pollution, semi-enclosed and enclosed basins modeling – Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Mediterranean Sea);
• Marine Biology and Ecology (phytoplankton, zooplankton, macrophytobenthos and zoobenthos, fish-stock assessment, biodiversity, response to environmental parameters – eutrophication and pollution);
• Marine Chemistry (monitoring and analysis of hydrochemical components in the sea, rivers and lakes, indicators of marine environment ecological state: nutrients, oxygen, suspended matter, POC, heavy metals in sea water and sediments);
• Marine Geology and Archeology (geological, geophysical and geo-chemical research, geological mapping, geomorphologic evolution and seabed processes, ancient sea coasts)
• Ocean Engineering (developing of oceanographic instrumentation, specialized and precise devices, deep diving and hyperbaric systems, hydro- and geo-acoustics).

The experts are involved in consulting decision and policy makers for elaboration of environmental friendly regulations and standards for sustainable management of Black Sea living resources at governmental and local authorities’ level. The scientific staffs are qualified in environmental impact assessment expertise.

Research vessel Akademik

Black Sea exploration is of special interest to the scientific community, the Institute of Oceanology believes. They do not rule out the possibility of coming across Phoenician or even Viking ships, or those of other ancient maritime peoples. Not only that, but the maritime archaeologists believe that there is a high probability that these vessels are well preserved due to the Black Sea’s unusually high concentration of hydrogen sulfide and lack of oxygen, which do not allow microorganisms – or any life, for that matter – to exist at a depth of 200 meters or more below the surface, effectively freezing the ships in time.

Dr Shtirkov loading the LYYN T38

The Institutes research submersible PC –8 has been operated since 1987. Main characteristics:

• Operating depth – 250m
• Deadweight – 5t
• Length – 6,5m
• Crew – 2+1
• Range of underwater cruise – 5 n miles
• Endurance underwater – 5 hours
• Scientific equipment – photo-camera, video-camera, manipulator, sampling devices, LYYN T38™.

The submersible has been used in many operations; one of the most publicly known is the series of expeditions to the Black Sea initiated by National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence and Institute for Exploration president Robert Ballard, the oceanographer and undersea explorer famous for his discovery of the Titanic and other historic shipwrecks. The Black Sea region lay at the crossroads of ancient Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Evidence suggests that the region was a center of maritime trade for millennia, stretching from Roman and Greek times as far back as the Bronze Age. The Black Sea is also the only sea with a deep-water anoxic layer, oxygen-deprived waters where wood-boring mollusks cannot survive. Because of this, wooden shipwrecks of antiquity can remain in a high state of preservation for thousands of years.

In January of 2003 it was announced that the remains of an ancient trading vessel, reportedly over 2,300 years old, dating back to the time of Plato in Greece. It was first seen on the 1st. of August 2002, in 275 feet of water from the submersible PC-8 launched from the Institutes research ship Akademik.

One of the recovered artifacts be­came world famous thanks to Na­tional Geographic, which officially presented to the world on 16 Jan­uary 2003 “The oldest shipwreck ever found in the Black Sea” aged V- III c. BC. It was an amphora that contained bones of a large freshwater cat fish, some olive pits and resin. Cut marks visible on the fish bones, together with other physical clues and references from classical literature, lead researchers to believe the amphora carried fish steaks—catfish that was butchered into six- to eight-centimeter (two- to three-inch) chunks and perhaps salted and dried for preservation during shipping. Such everyday fare would have been consumed by soldiers and the masses. This led to the conclusion that it was a big supply boat full of butchered fish that was being brought from the fish-rich regions of the Black Sea and their associated lakes back to Greece

T38 mounted with duct tape

In their latest set of tools the PC-8 has been equipped with a LYYN T38™.

“We have used the LYYN T 38 in our manned submersible during the inspection and video recording of a gas pipeline. I am very happy for this device that works perfect in the muddy waters of the Black sea. In our case, when the UW visibility decreases I start piloting the submersible watching the TV monitor showing the LYYN T38™ enhanced video and stop looking through the front window…

To LYYN I send my sincere thanks, to your engineers and designers who developed this fantastic device.”

Dr. Iliya Shtirkov, engineer at The Institute of Oceanology, Varna, Bulgaria

Diver in green water

Damaged subsea construction

Pipeline joint in turbid waters

Mooring in turbid green water

The cracked hull of a sailboat wreck

Placing an instrument on the sea floor

The top of the conning tower on the USS Oriskany, photo by thespis377 / Flickr

Real-time lyynified helmet mounted camera

Videos captured at training session at Norsk Yrkesdykkerskole AS.

Comparisons

[See post to watch Flash video]

The search was conducted using a camera mounted on a pole deployed from a 20’ vessel. Arc search patterns were executed using the boat motor to move the vessel left and right, while the bow of the vessel was fixed to a post on shore.

The LYYN T38 was connected between the pole camera and a DVR. A second monitor was plugged into the DVR so that Sam could see in the highly turbid water.

Broward County Sheriff's Office divers

Footage by:

Deputy Sam Lapinsky
Broward County Sheriff’s Office
Marine Unit/Dive Rescue Team

Sam also runs his own company: Innovative Dive Equipment Inc.

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.

The test was so successful that Avitone decided to join the LYYN dealer network for the Taiwanese Security and SubSea markets.

This first clip comes from a live test of the LYYN T38™ recorded from a surveillance camera overlooking Taipei Harbor.

The following clips come from their tests in low-light conditions. Click on the video, it is only black in the beginning until they turn on the LYYN T38.:

[See post to watch Flash video]

Published courtesy of Avitone Co, Ltd,
©2007 Avitone Co, Ltd, all rights reserved.

Dacon AS is a leading manufacturer and supplier of maritime rescue equipment, with the development, production, sales and export of approved man-overboard recovery systems, as well as the Dacon Rescue Dummy for realistic training purposes.

Dacon AS is Norway’s largest distributor and a leading expert on portable lighting equipment for professional and safety use, with Peli Products as main product line. Pelicase protector cases, Fisher Space Pen, Aquapac and Ramfan turbo ventilators are also distributed by the Lights & Cases department.

Dacon is also a leading supplier of both standard and tailored visual inspection equipment and advanced camera systems, for which they offer LYYN Hawk board™ integrated into the solution.

A customer case

The Dacon Snapper with the LYYN Hawk™ control panel integrated into the control unit (lower right corner).

Dacon AS was contacted by Fugro-Geoteam AS with a request for a new camera system for the inspection of in-sea equipment for seismic investigation. Dacon has earlier designed similar systems for Fugro but with other specifications.  This time the requirement was a system for 12 VDC, both battery and external power. They also wanted the units to have higher recording abilities but smaller in size.

The solution is based on a Sanyo zoom lens camera, an LCD monitor and a new type of Li-Ion battery. It is also equipped with integrated LYYN Hawk Board™ for real-time image enhancement and an Archos 605 (40GB) recording unit. Dacon managed to fit the whole system into two small Peli cases, and with a capacity of over 3 hours of battery time.

Fugro-Geoteam AS is very happy with their new cameras.

The Dacon Snapper with the LYYN Hawk™ control panel integrated into the control unit (lower right corner). Click image for a larger version.

More information in the Dacon subsea camera system product sheet.

Please visit the Dacon web site for more information about Dacon AS.

VideoRay LLC, of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, USA, makes the world’s smallest underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle, or ROV. The submersible weighs less than 4 kilos before accessories are added. VideoRay is also the world’s largest ROV manufacturer by number of vehicles, with more than 1100 Micro-ROV units sold.

VideoRay has several different units that are depth rated from 250 feet (76 m) up to 1,000 feet (300 m) and are utilized in a variety of underwater applications including; aquaculture & fishery operations, forensics & crime scene investigation, search & rescue missions, homeland & port security operations, recreational yachting, sportfishing & underwater marine life observation, shipwreck & treasure exploration, science, research and marine habitat mapping, inland dam inspection, offshore oil & gas rig observation, and numerous other underwater observation applications.

The ROV is operated from a suitcase sized control panel and provides crisp video footage to the user. Driving the VideoRay is similar to operating a video game. A specially trained ROV pilot is not needed. (In fact, kids raised on video games routinely put adults to shame piloting VideoRay.)

Following the successful introduction of LYYN T38™ to VideoRay users, there are many witnesses to its usefulness. However, since one of the strong points of the VideoRay ROV is its portability it introduced extra equipment necessary to carry around. “We have had several requests from users to have LYYN™ inside our products, and since LYYNs recent introduction the LYYN Hawk Board™ I am happy to say that this is now available.” says Chris Gibson, VideoRay Director Sales & Marketing.

VideoRay offers LYYN Hawk Boards™ integrated into the console in the standard configuration of the high-end model Pro4, as well as an option in earlier models. VideoRay dealers also offers LYYN T38™ to new and existing customers.

Please visit the Videoray web site for more information.

The company was established in 1993 and all of our professional staff have a solid background in ROVs and marine operations. Our head office and workshops are in Notodden, centrally located in Eastern Norway. With our specially adapted vehicles and mobile ROV rig, we can reach anywhere on the coast of Norway from Cape Lindesnes to Trondheim in less than nine hours.

Our ROVs are ready for deployment 24 hours a day and are capable of serving our customers anywhere in Norway.

Our vision: to be a flexible partner ready to offer all our clients the best possible service and technical support.

Sperre offers LYYN T38™ portable video enhancers as well as  integrated LYYN Hawk Boards™. Please visit the Sperre web site for more information.

The LBV systems are supplied with high resolution low light color cameras that provide high quality video images. Under less than perfect conditions the images can suffer from low contrast and poor color as a result of turbidity. This is not a fault of the camera, but rather a result of the conditions.

SeaBotix offers LYYN Hawk Boards™ integrated into the console as an option to all new systems. SeaBotix and SeaBotix dealers also offers LYYN T38™ to existing customers. Integration of a LYYN T38 into LBV and LBV150SE-5 systems is quite simple for most systems.

More info on the SeaBotix home page