Wireless Image Transmission for AUV Applications

Underwater images are useful for researching the characteristics of the environment and its inhabitants. Using the underwater acoustic modems along with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), images can be transmitted from a camera mounted on the AUV to a modem. A real-time implementation was done to transmit and receive images underwater using the AquaSENT acoustic modems. An image was extracted from a streaming web cam, resized, and split into individual packets which were capable of being transmitted by a modem. Once these packets were received by another modem, they were reconstructed to display the original image. The packet sizes that were transmitted were varied in a controlled test bed with shallow water. The preliminary results show that packets were generally fully received, and the transmitted image was identical to the received image.