An interactive end-user software application for a deep-sea photographic database

A photographic database is created for cataloguing data from underwater deep-tow photographic surveys conducted in the Central Indian Ocean Basin. This includes digitizing, encoding and merging different types of data and information obtained from different sources of the system. Date and time is used as the key reference for merging the data from different sources. Techniques that are developed to encode information from photographs and area calculations are discussed. Interactive JAVA application software is developed to play video clippings (dynamic images), displaying photographs (static images), plotting simple graphs, searching and retrieving information from the database and finally saving the searched information into separate files. The software is the first of its kind in deep-sea applications and it also attempts to educate the user about deep-sea photography. The application software is developed by modifying established routines and by creating new routines to save the retrieved information. The information retrieval from the database with newly developed routines to create graphs and to display images are some of the outputs of the application. Finally, further modifications needed for the application are briefed in this paper.