A Position Fixing Method for Near-Bottom Camera Data on the Seafloor

Abstract

The submarine camera system is one of the most effective detection methods for detecting seabed hydrothermal sulfide. The position fixing of camera equipment is generally achieved by the ultra-short baseline (USBL) positioning systems. The dynamic changes in the marine environment and the loss of acoustic signals lead to many abnormal points in the USBL positioning data. The existing methods cannot perform position fixing correction for USBL positioning data with many scattered abnormal points. This paper selects and focuses on the seabed camera data of the XunMei mineralization area acquired from the China South Atlantic voyage and employs the DTW optimization algorithm to solve this problem. This method is implemented based on Python language and an ArcGIS technical environment, and a total of 97,469 topographic profiles with 10 m spacing are extracted from the topographic data of the object area with 1m accuracy. Moreover, the highest similarity (95.9%) is obtained between the bathymetric profile of the camera survey line and the above topographic profile. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm is fast and effective, and the positioning correction accuracy of the deep-sea near-bottom camera data can reach the meter level (determined by the topographic data accuracy). Moreover, the solution can provide services for accurately position fixing near-bottom exploration equipment and its exploration data. It can also solve the problem of underwater position fixing problem that a GPS cannot solve.