A Method to Improve the Illumination Effect in an Underwater Environment

There are some innate shortcomings for traditional underwater observation system due to camera/light’s rigid-fixed connection with carrier vehicle such as ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle)/AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle). One of these is that the clearance of video image is seriously corrupted since the backscatter of water/particles is not overcome using fixed light source. To make up the deficiency, multi-light sources have to be adopted as a traditional approach. In this paper, a Master-Slave coordinated architecture was created and developed to provide a solvable scheme for improving illumination consequence. The illumination geometry between a camera and a light can dynamically be coordinated so that the backscatter which is the culprit blurring the target observed can be greatly decreased. The light source can follow up the moving target which the camera captures based on the numerical simulation results. The proposed observation system is especially suitable for our research purpose, where an agile system is needed for the observation of small range in Lake Michigan. The dynamic and hydrodynamic models used in this paper can be found in [1]. The control algorithms to be employed to evaluate this proposed method in this paper can be referred to [2–3].