Automatic Sea Vision, 360 24/7
Well then, rounding out a week of gear that you may need a lottery win to own, here’s something quite unusual called Automatic Sea Vision. The camera I saw at METS last year looked different than the one currently showing on the ASV Web site, but I’m sure the idea is the same.
The output of either a single fast-turning cam (right) or several fixed wide angle ones is automatically sewn together so a watch stander gets a zoomable 360 degree image like the one above. That particular screen is thermal imagery but the cameras could be low light, thermal, color, or all of the above. And once you have the computational horse power to manipulate video imagery like that, it’s a relatively easy step to look for anomalies like a ship on an empty ocean or an intruder on a quiet pier. Automatic Sea Vision can supposedly do all that. I don’t know the price, but I suspect that it’s not trivial! Here’s wishing you a fine weekend.
Lovely contraption, that. When I started the Microship project (14 years ago… eek!), one of the first projects was the video turret. What it lacked in computational image-stitching motion-detecting horsepower compared to the above, it made up in robotic geekery. Construction details and software are over here for the adventurous. Of course, now that it’s cheaper to scatter cheap cameras around and switch among them, I might use the turret on my new boat to steer a small Radiolabs RL1000 WiFi antenna, which just fits.
Cheers,
Steve