2024
Authors
Leite, PN; Pereira, PN; Dionisío, JMM; Pinto, AM;
Publication
OCEAN ENGINEERING
Abstract
Offshore wind farms face harsh maritime conditions, prompting the use of sacrificial anodes to prevent rapid structural degradation. Regular maintenance and replacement of these elements are vital to ensure ongoing corrosion protection, maintain structural integrity, and optimize efficiency. This article details the design and validation of the MARESye hybrid underwater imaging system, capable of retrieving heterogeneous tri-dimensional information with millimetric precision for the close-range inspection of submerged critical structures. The optical prowess of the system is first validated during low turbidity trials where the volumetric properties of a decommissioned anode are reconstructed with absolute errors down to 0.0008 m, and its spatial dimensions are depicted with sub-millimeter precision accounting for relative errors as low as 0.31%. MARESye is later equipped as payload in a commercial ROV during areal environment inspection mission at the ATLANTIS Coastal Test Center. This experiment sees the sensor provide live reconstructions of a sacrificial anode, revealing a biofouling layer of approximately 0.0130 m thickness. The assessment of the high-fidelity 2D/3D information obtained from the MARESye sensor demonstrates its potential to enhance the situational awareness of underwater vehicles, fostering reliable O&M procedures.
2025
Authors
Leite, PN; Pinto, AM;
Publication
INFORMATION FUSION
Abstract
Underwater environments pose unique challenges to optical systems due to physical phenomena that induce severe data degradation. Current imaging sensors rarely address these effects comprehensively, resulting in the need to integrate complementary information sources. This article presents a multimodal data fusion approach to combine information from diverse sensing modalities into a single dense and accurate tridimensional representation. The proposed fusiNg tExture with apparent motion information for underwater Scene recOnstruction (NESO) encoder-decoder network leverages motion perception principles to extract relative depth cues, fusing them with textured information through an early fusion strategy. Evaluated on the FLSea-Stereo dataset, NESO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 58.7%. Dense depth maps are achieved using multi-stage skip connections with attention mechanisms that ensure propagation of key features across network levels. This representation is further enhanced by incorporating sparse but millimeter-precise depth measurements from active imaging techniques. A regression-based algorithm maps depth displacements between these heterogeneous point clouds, using the estimated curves to refine the dense NESO prediction. This approach achieves relative errors as low as 0.41% when reconstructing submerged anode structures, accounting for metric improvements of up to 0.1124 m relative to the initial measurements. Validation at the ATLANTIS Coastal Testbed demonstrates the effectiveness of this multimodal fusion approach in obtaining robust tri-dimensional representations in real underwater conditions.
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