Battery-Free Wireless Imaging of Underwater Environments

Imaging underwater environments is of great importance to marine sciences, ocean sustainability, climatology, defense, marine robotics, geology, space exploration, and global food security. Despite advances in underwater imaging, most of the ocean and marine organisms remain unobserved and undiscovered. Existing methods for underwater imaging are unsuitable for scalable, long-term, in situ observations because they require tethering for power and communication. Here we describe underwater backscatter imaging, a method for scalable, real-time wireless imaging of underwater environments using fully-submerged battery-free cameras. The cameras power up from harvested acoustic energy, capture color images using ultra-low-power active illumination and a monochrome image sensor, and communicate wirelessly at net-zero-power via acoustic backscatter. We demonstrate the potential of this method in wireless battery-free imaging of animals, plants, pollutants, and localization tags in enclosed and open-water environments. The method’s self-sustaining nature makes it desirable for massive, continuous, and long-term ocean deployments with many applications including marine life discovery, submarine surveillance, and underwater climate change monitoring.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Akbar, Waleed

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Adib, Fadel

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/152949

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/152949