Google’s new underwater Street View...

The technology behind Google’s new underwater Street View

• By David Cardinal on May 17, 2013 at 9:10 am
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Street View is great for visualizing destinations before you arrive, but increasingly it is also being used to take people places they may never be able to go in person. Richard Vevers and Underwater Earth have partnered with Google to begin creating the full 360-degree views of coral reefs needed to make them part of the Street View universe. Vevers explained to us during a session at Google I/O that, “people don’t value what they can’t experience. Coral reefs are disappearing and need help. By sharing them through Street View we hope to generate interest and awareness, encouraging their preservation.” In addition, the large volume of data being collected by the project will also serve as a scientific baseline for future studies of how reefs and other sensitive ocean bottom areas are faring.

As you might expect, underwater Street View requires some fancy engineering. Because of the way lenses behave underwater, the team needed to design a new camera rig. By using three very-wide-angle-equipped cameras, the current Seaview cameras — dubbed SVII — can capture left and right images that are merged into a 360-degree panorama, as well as a direct downward image. The downward image is used for compatibility with existingscientific databases, which are primarily composed of images taken by shooting straight down. You can see one underwater Street View below — for the full collection, hit upGoogle’s Ocean Street View website.

Not your ordinary underwater camera housing

The individual cameras on an SVII are sealed in a sphere, which is placed on the front of a torpedo-shaped hull that provides propulsion and battery power. The rig is steered by a trained diver using its compass. It also includes a tablet for controlling the cameras — so they can remain in their watertight housing as much as possible — as well as GPS equipment and other sensors. The mapping process requires capturing an image about every three seconds — spaced about two meters apart — along the bottom. After each dive, the 3,000 or so “fisheye” images are assembled into 1,000 rectilinear panoramas.

Currently the team only has four cameras — costing about $50,000 each — which has limited them to exploring only part of the Great Barrier Reef. They aim to expand the project until they have covered all the world’s coral reefs, but that will require more money and more technology. In particular, Vevers is hoping to be able to make citizen scientists out of the 10 million recreational divers by allowing them to capture images with their own underwater cameras — perhaps even smartphones in underwater housings. In the meantime, it also thinks volunteers could be helpful in cataloging the sea creatures found in the images. Over time, their goal is to use the human-powered results as data for a machine learning system that can automate the process.

Other areas of interest for the Underwater Earth team, in addition to expanding its database of 150,000 images, are creating 3D models of the reefs, and partnering with autonomous submersible creators to deploy a robotic version of its rig that can stay down longer and doesn’t require a trained diver.