Real-time marine snow noise removal from underwater video

A system for detecting the movement of water with an optical flow sensor while immersed under the surface of said water, the system comprising of:

• a live video stream, deriving from a video recording device and camera;
• a video processing platform with an integrated central processing unit for command and control, presented by way of a video display connected to said video recording device and said camera and a network module to process a video output;
• a DVR storage module, for storing and retrieving video data;
• an image processing module through a user interface on said video processing platform with a designated FPGA to run an optical flow algorithm;
• wherein said optical flow algorithm utilizes dynamic chroma keying to identify, track and remove marine snow noise;
• and
• a video controller, for managing live frames retrieved from said live video stream and for merging said live frames to removal occluded pixels.

A method for detecting the movement of water with an optical flow sensor while immersed under the surface of said water, the method comprising of:

• capturing a video stream by way of a video recording device and camera in an aquatic environment;
• transmitting said video stream to a video processing platform with an integrated central processing unit for command and control and a graphic processing unit for presenting a visual display of occluded video frames;
• storing data of said video stream to a DVR storage module;
• processing said video stream on said video processing platform, by way of a video display, over a network module to process a video output;
• processing video frames of said video stream on an image processing module through a user interface on said video processing platform with a designated FPGA to run an optical flow algorithm;
• removing occluded pixels in said video frames of said video stream using a dynamic chroma key mask operated managing said video frames by way of a video controller;
• creating a synthetic video frame by merging unobstructed pixels from said video frames with occluded pixels from previous frames using said dynamic chroma key mask;
• and
• fusing incoming videos with said chroma masks to encode and decode internet protocol video streams over said network module.