Subsea service firm N-Sea has teamed up with Strathclyde University on a project they claim will “transform” pipeline inspection.
They said that while subsea inspection has come a long way in the last decade, the task of annotating data is still done manually.
They are trying to find a way of automating that process.
The Data Lab, A Scottish Government-backed initiative to help companies make better use of data, has now agreed to stump up funding for the research.
David Murray, survey and inspection data centre manager at N-Sea, a Dutch group with bases in Aberdeen, said: “We have seen ROV technology evolve significantly over the years.
“However, inspection operations still require ROV pilots and inspection engineers who annotate the data acquired.
“By working closely together, we aim to automate the inspection process and operate ROVs at previously impossible speeds.”
Christos Tachtatzis of Strathclyde University said: “Deep learning approaches have great potential to speed up the inspection processes which remain manual and labour intensive.
“We have a long tradition of conducting industrially relevant research with high economic, environmental and societal impacts and this is a prime example of the challenges we seek to provide solutions for.
“Owing to the support of the Data Lab, we are looking forward to a fruitful collaboration with N-Sea.”
Duncan Hart, business development executive for Data Lab in Aberdeen, said: “We’re very excited to support this project, using state of the art data science to help N-Sea create an innovative solution, which will have a significant positive impact on the oil and gas industry during these tough economic times and will continue to advance academic research in this field.”
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