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Oceans 2.0
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Oceans 2.0 – Web Control of Undersea High Definition
Video Camera

This project is a part of the University of Victoria and Neptune Canada Oceans 2.0 project funded by Canarie Inc. The goal of this project is to provide online live full resolution high definition video from the seafloor and facilitate interactive remote control of the camera using web services software. The expected result is that scientists will be able to control their own view of the undersea environment from wherever they are.

Further information on the Oceans 2.0 project can be found on the Neptune Canada Oceans 2.0 website.

Oceans 2.0 Project Goal

The goal of the Oceans 2.0 project is to allow the diverse and distributed community of ocean scientists to work together on research projects aided by a dynamic and modern web-based software system providing transparent access to distributed data sources and remote underwater assets.

High Definition Video from the Seafloor

The Project will transmit live full broadcast standard high definition video from a camera initially installed on the undersea VENUS network, 100m below the surface of the Saanich Inlet on Vancouver Island, to scientists, educators and the public throughout Canada and around the world via CA*net 4 and inter-connected broadband networks. The camera will subsequently be deployed on the NEPTUNE network.

VENUS is an ambitious project to conduct coastal oceanography in an innovative and informative way. It is a network of instruments in the ocean to observe the marine waters around southern Vancouver Island. The NEPTUNE project has laid a 3,000 km network of powered fibre-optic cable, connected to a number of seafloor “laboratories,” or nodes, on the seabed over the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. The instruments will be interactive — scientists will instruct them to respond immediately to events such as storms, plankton blooms, fish migrations, earthquakes, tsunamis, and underwater volcanic eruptions.

This project will use Web Services to interactively control the camera and video transmission from across the continent. The challenge is to minimize latency to enable camera control input, such as panning, in reaction to camera responses observed in the transmitted video stream.

Objectives

1. To create web services software that will match a common set of underwater video camera control inputs and video stream outputs to the bandwidth available to a particular scientist and allows scientists to collaborate through sharing the same underwater view in real time;

2. To create web services software that will allow a scientist to connect to a video repository containing annotated video sequences, to conduct an automated search and to compare these recordings to a live video camera image or to another recorded sequence;

3. To adopt a standard video recording and annotation system integrated with the NEPTUNE Canada and VENUS DMAS;

4. To enable scientists to use the same platform interface no matter which camera they may be using by creating a common Graphical User Interface (GUI) integrated with the NEPTUNE Canada and VENUS DMAS for control of both high and low quality video cameras on the networks;

5. If possible, to allow scientists to store their own preferences and to schedule automated repeated scans of an area of interest using automated event detection software that “learns” what is of interest to a scientist while he or she is operating the camera;

6. To create a life size aquarium display showing research scientists at work.

Underwater HD Video Capture and Transmission Hardware

1. Panasonic AK-HC1500 camera with Canon HJ22ex7 zoom lens;

2. Insite Pacific custom underwater camera housing;

3. W&W Communications Caiman low latency h.264 avc video compression module and decompression module;

4. Pleora ASI-Pro video transmission and reception modules.