Colour corrected seafloor BioCam images collected from the Darwin Mounds Marine Protected Area during RRS Discovery cruise DY108/109 (2019).

The dataset consists of georeferenced colour corrected images collected from the Darwin Mounds Marine Protected Area (MPA) during RRS Discovery cruise DY108/109 in 2019. Images were acquired using the BioCam seafloor imaging device of the University of Southampton mounted on the Autosub6000 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) of the National Oceanography Centre. Two strobes, one mounted at the front and one at the back of the AUV, illuminated the seafloor when the colour camera of BioCam, mounted at the centre of the AUV, acquired those images once every 3 s. Images were stored in raw format along with timestamped navigation data (DVL, USBL, GPS). Data from different navigation sensors were fused with the images in post-processing using an extended Kalman smoother (EKS) implemented in oplab-pipeline (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6623369). The images were then colour corrected using an algorithm implemented in oplab-pipeline. The imaging survey was undertaken to demonstrate the BioCam technology developed by University of Southampton scientists under the NERC OCEANIDS programme's BioCam project (NE/P020887/1) to generate wide area 3D visual reconstructions of seafloor features.