Identifying rhodamine dye plume sources in near-shore oceanic environments by integration of chemical and visual sensors.

This article presents a strategy for identifying the source location of a chemical plume in near-shore oceanic environments where the plume is developed under the influence of turbulence, tides and waves. This strategy includes two modules: source declaration (or identification) and source verification embedded in a subsumption architecture. Algorithms for source identification are derived from the moth-inspired plume tracing strategies based on a chemical sensor. The in-water test missions, conducted in November 2002 at San Clemente Island (California, USA) in June 2003 in Duck (North Carolina, USA) and in October 2010 at Dalian Bay (China), successfully identified the source locations after autonomous underwater vehicles tracked the rhodamine dye plumes with a significant meander over 100 meters. The objective of the verification module is to verify the declared plume source using a visual sensor. Because images taken in near shore oceanic environments are very vague and colors in the images are not well-defined, we adopt a fuzzy color extractor to segment the color components and recognize the chemical plume and its source by measuring color similarity. The source verification module is tested by images taken during the CPT missions.

本文提出了一种在近岸海洋环境中识别化学羽流源位置的策略，该环境中的羽流是在湍流、潮汐和波浪的影响下形成的。该策略包括两个模块：源声明（或识别）以及包含在包容架构中的源验证。源识别算法源自基于化学传感器的受蛾启发的羽流追踪策略。2002年11月在美国加利福尼亚州圣克莱门特岛、2003年6月在美国北卡罗来纳州达克以及2010年10月在中国大连湾进行的水下测试任务中，自主水下航行器追踪了蜿蜒超过100米的罗丹明染料羽流后，成功识别了源位置。验证模块的目的是使用视觉传感器验证所声明的羽流源。由于在近岸海洋环境中拍摄的图像非常模糊，且图像中的颜色不清晰，我们采用模糊颜色提取器来分割颜色成分，并通过测量颜色相似度来识别化学羽流及其源。源验证模块通过CPT任务期间拍摄的图像进行了测试。