Looking for footage

General Discussion
1

Hi. New to the forum, I’m looking for some underwater video of a harbour wall (preferably steel sheet piles) for some photogrammetry testing.

Willing to pay for good quality footage. May also consider some other underwater structures if quality is good.

Thanks

2

Hi @sbwrx, welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

There may be some community members who have footage like that, or are willing to get it for you, but it’s likely helpful if you can provide more details about what you’re specifically looking for, and what you’re offering in return.

I’ve done inspection work at a previous company, and some factors I’d recommend you try to specify clearly are:

  • what constitutes “good” (enough) here?
    • is there a resolution requirement?
    • is it ok to get lossily encoded footage, or does it need to be raw?
      • the BlueROV2 uses H264-encoded footage by default, which includes chroma sub-sampling
    • does every frame need to be sharp and well-exposed, or is it fine to have regular sharp frames with some blurriness and/or poor lighting/visibility in between?
    • is it problematic if there is marine debris floating around?
    • does the video need to be from close to the structure?
    • do you want a variety of conditions covered, if possible?
    • does the structure need to be covered from all sides and/or across its full depth?
      • covering the full extent of a structure is generally important for inspections, but can be challenging to achieve with a tethered vehicle, and may not be essential for your proof of concept
    • bear in mind that the stricter the requirements here, the easier it will be to do photogrammetry, but the harder it will be to ensure it works well in generally practical conditions
  • how much pre-segmentation, annotation, and metadata are you expecting?
    • would it be ok to provide just a single video file that included parts of several piles, without indicating which parts of the video correspond to the same pile?
    • should the video file(s) be trimmed to just parts that display structure?
    • are you wanting corresponding telemetry logs that give the vehicle’s estimate of its heading and depth at each frame?
      • this likely isn’t particularly difficult to provide, but heading may be skewed by large nearby metal structures, and not all workflows would be able to make use of the data
    • are you wanting accurate positioning data, relative to the structure or just of the vehicle over time
      • vehicles don’t come with this by default, but some are equipped with sensors that can provide it
    • does there need to be some kind of size data included (e.g. known pile diameter, general object of known size in the environment, laser scaler in the video feed, scanning sonar measurements, etc), or is your testing (at this stage) scale invariant?
  • how much data are you wanting?
    • is video of one pile enough?
    • is there a limit to how much video you’ll be able to meaningfully work with?
  • if someone wants payment, is there some kind of pay range you’re able to offer, depending on what and how much data they can provide?
1 Like
3

Hello @sbwrx,

We don’t have footage of harbor walls exactly (at least, not metal walls), but we have conducted extensive ROV video surveys along the Elliott Bay Marina breakwater (comprised of large stones, or riprap) in Seattle, Washington, as part of a research project with the Port of Seattle. These surveys utilize GoPro 10s mounted on a customized BlueROV2, with one GoPro facing forward, and another facing downward. I recently made a post here on the forums about our methods and the overall project (see here).

We have some footage in the public domain, for example, here’s a downward-facing video, and here’s the forward-facing video from the same survey. The videos were shot in 4K 30fps, though obviously the Google Drive video preview will be a much lower resolution. Would these or similar videos work for you? If so, we can provide more videos that aren’t in the public domain. We also have the complete ROV telemetry logs associated with these surveys, including the Ping Sonar Altimeter data that we’ve appended in. I wouldn’t ask for $, though if you indeed successfully compile a photogrammetry model using these videos, I would very much appreciate you sharing information about those methods, as that’s one of the directions we want to go with our work.

*edit: In terms of underwater structures, I just remembered we also have ROV footage of tire reefs, as well as pilings under the Seattle Aquarium, that might also be of interest.

Cheers!
Zach

2 Likes
4

Hi Eliot. Thanks for the response. Agreed more information would be useful, I suppose I was initially just looking for what might be already in existence rather than having a tight specification. Will provide more info in due course. Thanks

1 Like
5

Hi @zhrandell,

Appreciate you taking the time to respond in detail. I’ve had a look at your message and the links and it makes for interesting reading. If possible I would like to see what your video is like for the pilings under the Seattle Aquarium - in the highest quality possible - do you have altimeter data for this also? Of course I can send through the photogrammetry models if we manage to make something reasonable from the video.

Thanks,
Dan

6

@sbwrx, I’ll look through our footage to identify videos with pilings. However, given the video-hungry nature of your photogrammetry application, I might honestly prefer to do a standalone dive to film the pilings as comprehensively as possible. As mentioned, we have forward- (0°) and downward-facing (90°) GoPro cameras, but for photogrammetry, it may be advantages to add on a third that splits the difference between the two, i.e., have forward-facing (0°), angled (45°), and downward (90°) cameras (which we can easily do with existing hardware). That’d ensure you’d have overlapping points across all three videos. We could then comprehensively dive down along pilings, film laterally across different pilings, etc. If there’s certain flight profiles that you’d be particularly interested in (e.g., diving down pilings, multiple angles/passes of same piling, covering the seafloor along the base on pilings, etc.), just let me know. There’s also a lot of debris along the bottom there (e.g., old shark research cages, old pilings laying horizontal along the seafloor), so we could film that all, too, if desired.

Note that this all is very easy to do as the Seattle Aquarium is on a pier atop a bunch of pilings, and we routinely fly our ROV from that pier (Pier 59). I’m traveling for a conference and am out of town for the next week or so, but we have a ROV dive scheduled Nov 19th from Pier 59. If there’s no emergency rush on when you need the footage, we could film the pilings extensively at that time. We’d provide the ROV telemetry file, which we’ll have trimmed down to match the video survey, and we’ll also append in the Ping Sonar Altimeter data; the telemetry file will also include lat/lon GPS coordinates.

What do you think? Would your timeline allow you to wait until Nov 19th for detailed footage? I think folks at the aquarium would get a kick out of seeing a photogrammetry model of Pier 59, so this is something I’m happy to collaborate with you on.

1 Like
7

@zhrandell OK, sounds like we both might benefit from this. Waiting until the 19th isn’t an issue for the comprehensive data. It would be beneficial to see some of the existing footage upfront if possible? and then I can hopefully provide some guidance on any specifics.

I’ve dropped you my email address in a message.