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Summary
An innovative solution to revolutionise the speed and ease of seabed mapping in real-time utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been developed thanks to a partnership between the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) School of Computing Sciences and GeoAcoustics Ltd.
Seabed mapping is used to produce a bathymetric (or water depth) profile of a given area of seabed using sonar technology. Sonar works by sending sound pulses into the water and measuring the echoes reflected from the seabed and any underwater structures that may be present. However, many unwanted data points are also generated and these need to be filtered out after the survey to produce a true representation of the seabed profile. This is a resource-intensive, expensive, and time-consuming task, often taking an experienced surveyor days or even weeks to complete. Which is why, as of this year, over three-quarters of the planet’s seabed remains unmapped.
Following encouraging results, further research and development grants were awarded - one an Enabling Innovation: Research to Application (EIRA) award and one an Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP). These enabled an AI module to be developed which was then evaluated using various benchmark data sets and sea trials.
These trials established that the AI was able to produce accurate and consistent results comparable to that of an experienced surveyor, without needing any human intervention and operating at a fraction of the time. The AI module was integrated into the company’s existing software and is capable of processing survey data in real-time, saving days or weeks of post-processing by trained human users.
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