HROV images of the Karasik Seamount seafloor collected during POLARSTERN cruise PS101

On the 30th September 2016 the Hybrid-Remote Operated Vehicle (HROV) 'Nereius Under Ice' (NUI) was used to conduct a ~12 hr dive to image in high resolution a 500 m x 500 m area of the Karasik seamount with a pair of cameras. These cameras were a bespoke system consisting of a down-looking stereo camera pair with synchronized strobes provided by O. Pizarro, Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney, Australia. The survey dive was conducted at a speed of 0.7 m/s at a nominal flight height of 3 m, collecting images at a frequency of 1 per second.

The left camera collected a colour image of 1360 x 1024 pixels and the right a monocrome image of the same size each second. Each image covered approximately 2 sq. m of seafloor, depending on seafloor topography.

Navigation for the HROV, and therefore to georeference each collected image, was determined by Long Baseline Navigation, with relative position of subsequent collected images determined from the onboard Dynamic Velocity Logger (DVL).

In this dataset all ~12,000 collected raw images and position information are provided.

Images collected prior to 20:53:54 are of the lower water column, recorded on descent, and contain little information other than the presence of the occasional jellyfish etc. From 20:53:54 imaging of the seafloor with the colour camera was achieved, and at 21:08:13 the monochrome camera also commenced seafloor imaging.