Showing posts from May 7, 2010

30m Reef Surveys using a Video Camera Array

The BREAM video camera array. Circular holes in the front allow internal video cameras to film fishes.

The BREAM team has been busy for the past couple of months designing and building a video camera array, or "drop-camera", to survey coral reefs that are too deep to survey by divers.
A view of the underside of the video array, showing the circular holes
for the video cameras to film through, and the rectangular holes forlights.
BREAM technician Robert Fisher is standing proudly in the background.

The camera array has 2 HD1080 video cameras (with associated pairs of 1500W lights and a pair of green lasers to provide scale in the resultant video) facing downward to film the corals, and an additional pair of HD cameras without lights to film fish. The array also has a lower resolution camera that is wired to the surface by a cable that provides live video that we can see while the array is deployed. This video allows us to keep the array at the correct depth in the water column and…