Identification of influential factors for underwater laser imaging

Both the design of experiment (DOE) process and the Taguchi method have been used to study the measurement characteristics of underwater laser imaging. Diverse factors that might have a substantial effect on the quality characteristic of the underwater laser imaging were selected for further assessment. Two sets of experiments were performed for finding out the performance distinction between the imaging systems with monochrome and color video cameras. To facilitate the assessment of the quality characteristic, three various algorithms were developed for detecting the peak location of the laser spot formed on the captured image. Formulas for factors related to image processing such as brightness and contrast were defined. The results indicate that brightness, contrast, and peak detection algorithm are the main factors to dominate the performance of the monochrome imaging system. As for the color imaging system, brightness, contrast, peak detection algorithm, sampling range, and specific primary color for intensity computation are all critical to the system performance. It is also interesting to note that a good selection of the image resolution and the sampling range can shorten the computing time and get high precision results.