Imaging Tech to Map Endurance
Now that the wreck of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, has been discovered in the Weddell Sea a century after it sank, the search team is using Voyis’s advanced underwater technology to digitally recreate the Endurance and surrounding debris field. The tech uses highly accurate 3D models and extremely crisp photography generated by Voyis’s Insight Pro laser scanner, Observer Pro stills cameras and Nova LED panels.
Using the Insight Pro laser scanner, the survey team will be able to accurately map the Endurance. The system broadcasts the ultradense point cloud model in real time to the crew, digitally building up the shipwreck as they “fly” over the wreck with a Saab Sabertooth vehicle.
Complementing the Insight Pro system on this expedition is the Observer Pro imaging system, a long-range, highly sensitive digital camera, and two extremely high-output Nova LED panels to deliver evenly illuminated stills images.
The Observer Pro imaging system works seamlessly with the Insight Pro laser scanner, providing gapless laser data with interlaced stills. Additionally, images taken by the Observer system are automatically color-corrected using Voyis’s machine learning “True-Colour” correction, an onboard improvement that replicates the exact color of the shipwreck if it were brought ashore, along with additional undistortion and light-leveling algorithms to improve the image quality in real time. Therefore, it will be possible to create photomosaics and photogrammetric models of the Endurance to further complement the highly accurate 3D point cloud model generated by the Insight Pro.