Visual information processing for deep-sea visual monitoring system

Abstract Due to the rising demand for minerals and metals, various deep-sea mining systems have been developed for the detection of mines and mine-like objects on the seabed. However, many of them contain some issues due to the diffusion of dangerous substances and radioactive substances in water. Therefore, efficient and accurate visual monitoring is expected by introducing artificial intelligence. Most recent deep-sea mining machines have little intelligence in visual monitoring systems. Intelligent robotics, e.g., deep learning-based edge computing for deep-sea visual monitoring systems, have not yet been established. In this paper, we propose the concept of a learning-based deep-sea visual monitoring system and use testbeds to show the efficiency of the proposed system. For example, to sense the underwater environment in real time, a large quantity of observation data, including captured images, must be transmitted from the seafloor to the ship, but large-capacity underwater communication is difficult. In this paper, we propose using deep compressed learning for real-time communication. In addition, we propose the gradient generation adversarial network (GGAN) to recover the heavily destroyed underwater images. In the application layer, wavelet-aware superresolution is used to show high-resolution images. Therefore, the development of an intelligent remote control deep-sea mining system with good convenience using deep learning applicable to deep-sea mining is expected.