The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B5. Beijing 2008 
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6. CONCLUSIONS 
This paper describes the use of stereo-video on a towed body 
system and illustrates some of its applications to mapping and 
understanding sea bed habitat in deep water. The system 
provides the ability to acquire quantitative data, such as 
abundance, size and area measurements, from stereo-video with 
known estimates of accuracy and precision. It has important 
applications for conservation and fishery management, 
particularly by providing fine-scale, continuous, non-integrated, 
non-extractive data on animal and habitat distributions. On 
going enhancements of the system, namely progressive-scan 
high resolution video imagery and deep water self-calibration, 
will substantially improve the accuracy, resolution and utility of 
the system in the future. Ultimately the research will lead to 
automation of the process of accurately identifying and 
estimating the percentage coverage of benthic features and 
biomass of the sample of sessile organisms. 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
The authors gratefully acknowledge the skilled team in CSIRO 
Marine and Atmospheric Research Engineering and Workshop 
Services for operational support both at sea and in the 
laboratory. Thanks are due also to the Museum of Victoria for 
permission to publish the photographs used in several figures, 
and Geosciences Australia for contributing part of figure 1. 
This paper is partly based on a paper presented at the Eighth 
Conference on Optical 3-D Measurement Techniques and 
published by ETH Zurich, Switzerland (Shortis et al., 2007). 
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