Underwater environments are vibrant ecosystems filled with detail, structure, and life—but to the human eye and conventional cameras, much of that is hidden behind a blue-green veil.
In water, light behaves differently than in air, with red wavelengths absorbed almost immediately as depth increases. While an object like a wooden shipwreck reflects red and green light and appears brown in air, that same object appears grey or greenish underwater, because the red wavelengths never reach the camera. Standard imaging systems aren’t designed to compensate for this effect, leading to unnatural and inaccurate representations of the subsea world.
With the launch of Deep Vision Optics, Voyis brings forward a powerful solution to restore true colour to underwater imagery—enabling subsea explorers, researchers, and inspectors to visualize assets as they would appear in air.
The Physics of Colour Loss Underwater
To understand how Deep Vision Optics works, it’s essential to grasp the problem it solves.
Human colour perception is based on how different wavelengths of light (the red, green, and blue channels) reflect off surfaces and reach our eyes. In air, these wavelengths are absorbed relatively evenly. In water, however, shorter wavelengths like red are absorbed first, drastically altering the perceived colour of objects even at shallow depths.
Standard cameras rely on colour formation models that assume a terrestrial light environment. These models neglect the strong wavelength dependency of underwater light absorption, making them insufficient for subsea applications.
Voyis’ Approach: Restoring Colour with Optical Precision
Deep Vision Optics was engineered to correct this imbalance at the source. Instead of relying solely on post-processing, the system takes a multi-layered approach to true colour correction, combining:
- Spectrally tuned optics that account for wavelength loss and balance incoming light before it reaches the sensor
- Calibrated an dpowerful LEDs, ensuring consistent illumination across varying distances and geometries
- Advanced in-sensor corrections, compensating for absorption effects in real time
The goal is simple but powerful: produce underwater images with colours as they would be perceived in air—bringing accuracy, clarity, and truth to subsea data collection.
Solving for Consistency in Survey-Grade Imaging
Colour accuracy is only half the battle. For applications like photogrammetry, which require detailed 3D reconstructions from image sequences, consistency between images is equally critical.
In subsea surveys, features are captured from multiple angles and at varying distances. As the ROV moves, so does the artificial light source, changing both the illumination pattern and the colour saturation of each frame. A robust solution must therefore deliver not only colour correction but also image-to-image consistency, ensuring that shared features in overlapping images match across the dataset.
Deep Vision Optics was developed with this exact challenge in mind. Its calibration and correction models are optimized for multi-perspective imaging, enabling reliable photogrammetry and structure-from-motion workflows, even in complex subsea conditions.
Uncovering What Was Once Hidden
By restoring red and warm tones to images captured at depth, Deep Vision Optics allows users to see details previously obscured—rust stains on steel, growth patterns on coral, or structural damage on a shipwreck. This level of clarity enhances everything from infrastructure inspection and environmental monitoring to archaeological exploration.
True colour correction isn’t just a visual upgrade—it’s a data integrity upgrade, helping professionals trust what they see and act with greater confidence.
Seeing the Subsea World as It Really Is
With Deep Vision Optics, Voyis brings the next generation of underwater imaging to life. By correcting for the fundamental physics of light loss underwater, and balancing that with cross-image consistency, it delivers high-fidelity, colour-accurate imagery—enabling a clearer understanding of our oceans, one true colour at a time.
