Cloud-accelerated analysis of subsea high-definition camera data

The seafloor high-definition camera (CamHD) installed on the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cabled Array (CA) provides real-time video of the Mushroom vent at the ASHES hydrothermal field in the Axial Volcano caldera on the Juan de Fuca spreading zone (Figure 1). CamHD performs a pre-programmed 13-minute motion sequence every 3 hours. The video captured during this sequence is stored as a 13GB HD video file in the OOI Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) at Rutgers University. As of July 2017 there are approx. 6700 videos in the CI, all of which are publicly accessible through a conventional HTTP interface. Unfortunately, it is impractical for a researcher (and taxing on the CI bandwidth) to download, store, and process the extent of the video archive for analysis. We describe two elements of our efforts to accelerate CamHD video analysis: a cloud-hosted application which provides a simplified interface for extracting individual frames from CamHD videos in a time- and bandwidth-efficient manner; and a tool for the automatic isolation and identification of video subsets showing a sequence of known camera positions. Automatic identification of these video segments allows rapid and automatic development of e.g., time lapse videos.