IRIS - An Innovative Inspection System for Maritime Hull Structures

Abstract

Today digital photographs play an important role for documenting the condition of a ship's hull structure. They are excessively taken but are typically only managed like "photos in a shoe box" with no direct link to the hull structure. This makes it difficult and sometimes impossible to localize the structure shown on the photographs for further follow up or monitoring activities if no positioning information was added manually. An automated positioning of the photos (or any other measurement) within a structural model of the vessel would resolve this problem without increasing costs for capturing photos. Within tanks, automatic positioning is difficult because of the lack of GPS signals. Therefore, during the last two years, DNV GL and DLR developed an inspection system called IRIS allowing acquisition of inspection photos, their automatic spatial referencing and an integration into a 3D model based hull integrity management system. This helmet based system takes stereo camera and inertial sensor signals as an input and allows automatic positioning of photos in a model of the ship after an inspection.