A Real-time High-resolution Underwater Ecological Observation Streaming System

This paper proposes a distributed architecture for real-time high-resolution underwater ecological observation streaming. The system, based on a three-tier architecture, includes stream receiver unit, stream processor unit, and presentation unit. It is a distributed computing and a loose coupling architecture. Stream receiver unit supports a variety of capture source devices, such as HDV, DV, WebCam, TV Card, Capture Card, etc., and stream compress encoding formats, such as MPEG-1/2/4, FLV, WMV, MJPEG, etc., that are commonly used. The multiple format supported feature made our system an outstanding platform, on which streaming can easily be broadcasted in real-time. Stream processor unit has two options: one directly streaming to presentation unit, the other to slices streaming into sequence of images and can be extracted and stored for further implement image processing. Presentation unit supports multiple display devices handy to end users. A web-based user interface was designed to allow users to select multiple realtime streams to browse. The system has been demonstrated to ecological observation in Taiwan. Ken-Ting National Park is located on the southernmost tip of Taiwan and is known for its dazzling coral reef. Four underwater CCTV cameras and three underwater high-resolution cameras are deployed to monitor the ecosystem of coral reefs continually and videos captured are streamed and processed in real-time. For HDV cameras, the challenges are network bandwidth and decode a high-resolution stream in real-time. The distributed servers are putted on NMMBA (National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium), and streams are transferred back to NCHC’s (National Center for High-performance Computing) multicasting pool. Experimental results showed that the proposed distributed system is robust, adaptive, and powerful. Google Earth is a virtual globe and geographic program. It displays satellite images of varying resolution of the Earth’s surface, and users can see the details, such as cities and streets, on Earth. Due to the powerful functions and population of Google Earth, we integrated our streaming system on Google Earth. Users can browse the real-time streaming and the surrounding environment on Google Earth.