Issues in high performance vision systems design for underwater interventions

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a vision system conceived to provide perception in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) intervention tasks. Due to the accuracy requirements inherent in manipulation tasks, high performance vision systems, enabling adequate perception capabilities, are needed to cope with underwater interventions. However, vision systems are challenged by the difficulties and variability of underwater environments as well as by the need to operate in a sealed canister. The vision system described in this paper addresses design issues like computational performance, energy power consumption, heat dissipation, and network capabilities. Even though the system has been designed to support stereovision, experiments in several underwater contexts have shown that stereovision is seldom applicable, due to the many problems faced by light propagation in water. Developing a system for underwater operation emphasizes the need for tradeoffs between computational performance and power consumption and dissipation, as well as the need for flexibility to support multiple vision processing pipelines and adapt to the specific underwater context.