Duncan McGehee Jules S. Jaffe
Marine Phys. Lab., Scripps Inst. of Oceanogr., Univ. of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0205
The Acoustical Imaging Group in the Marine Physical Laboratory, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has developed a real time, high-resolution three-dimensional acoustical imaging system for use in the ocean. The system, called Fish TV (FTV) is designed for the observation of macrozooplankton and small fish. FTV can synoptically examine a 16(degrees) by 16(degrees) volume of seawater with a 1-Hz frame rate. The sonar has recently been used at sea in two configurations. In the first experiment, the sonar was mounted 40 m deep, looking laterally from the research platform R/P FLIP. A video camera provided ground-truthing. In the second experiment, the sonar was attached to a Phantom DS4 remotely operated vehicle and deployed, again with video ground-truthing. Results indicate that the system can be used both to track animals in three dimensions and to estimate their density.