<title>Development of an operational digital photogrammetric system for the North Sea oil and gas industry</title>

Abstract

The Offshore Oil and Gas Industry in the North Sea has many requirements for three- dimensional measurements in air and underwater. A market audit found that use of conventional photogrammetry was being rejected for many applications because the information was not available fast enough. A development project was set up to replace the photographic cameras with a choice of video or high resolution digital electronic cameras, and the analysis system with a personal computer based image processing system. This solution is now in operation. The paper details the in-house development of the high resolution digital electronic camera and the personal computer based measurement hardware and software. It includes a discussion of the technological parameters, including the method for pixel for pixel correlation within the digital system, camera calibration techniques, the system algorithms, sub-pixel measurement and dimensional accuracy. It introduces the work that was carried out to make the final product acceptable to structural engineers, who now use it to transfer three- dimensional measurements to their CAD systems. It also looks at the work that is being carried out to transform the system into a closed loop control system for underwater robotic manipulators, which includes binary conversion, convolution filtering and tracking functions.