Originally Posted by JD-EE
auv-ee, I'd expect more time spent looking and less time snapping pictures of everything in sight (or site.) 100,000 pictures stored in a 10 bit HD raw format would be quite a lot of data. Now, I am aware that finding computers with 207 gigabytes of spare storage is easy these days if you purchase new they might have decided to save storage and only preserved the pictures that showed something interesting.
With an AUV there is no such thing as looking at something that has not been recorded. There is no significant bandwidth between the bottom and the surface, so everything is recorded blind and sifted through after recovery.
The camera is 2k x 2k, B&W, reported recently in a commercial article. Images are likely stored in an uncompressed format, because images of the bottom are noisy (sand/silt looks like noise) and so do not compress effectively. Dynamic range is the key factor in UW photography, because the contrast is low and the lighting is uneven, so the images would be stored with at least 16 bits/pixel. So each image should be about 2-4Mbytes (depending on bits/pixel). Not a lot of storage by today's standards. Also, the data would be dumped to a larger disk after each dive. No problem acquiring 100,000 or more pictures.