Digital Enhancement Techniques for Underwater Video Image Sequences

Due to concern about the current state of the world's oceans, several large scale scientific projects have begun to investigate the condition of our oceans. These projects are making use of underwater video sequences to monitor marine species. The move to using underwater video monitoring introduces labour intensive manual processing techniques. This leads to the need for an automated system capable of processing the data at a much greater speed. This project investigated whether the development of suitable image processing techniques could be used for pre-processing underwater images from a fish farm and locating fish within these images using computer vision techniques. Using underwater images leads to some serious problems when compared to images from a clearer environment. Visibility in an underwater environment is poor, even when using state of the art equipment. After reviewing the broad field of computer vision and current underwater projects, an image pre-processing system was developed in MATLAB using suitable image processing and analysis techniques. The application developed was able to successfully locate an acceptable number of fish within the underwater images. The project demonstrated that automated analysis of underwater video images is needed and is possible. Automatic processing of large quantities of video image sequences will be of great benefit in the future. It will allow scientific researchers to study the ocean environment and its species more effectively. Pre-processing is an essential component of the overall process that will lead to automation of underwater video data analysis for marine science applications.