The ocean covers 70% of the earth surface, and influences almost every aspect in our life, such as climate, fuel, security, and food. All over the world, including Israel, depleting resources on land are encouraging increased human activity in the ocean, for example: gas drilling, desalination plants, port constructions, aquaculture, bio-fuel, and more. These expanded activities influence the delicate ecology that is already threatened by global warming and ocean acidification, and present a risk of over-exploitation. The ocean is a complex, vast, foreign environment that is hard to explore and therefore much about it is still unknown. Interestingly, only 5% of the ocean floor has been seen so far. As human access to most of the ocean is very limited, optical imaging systems can serve as our eyes in those remote areas. However, optical imaging underwater is challenging due to intense pressures at depth, strong color and distance dependent attenuation, refraction at the interface air/water, and the ever-changing and rugged conditions of the natural ocean. In this talk I describe several imaging systems I developed and show how they can be used to solve acute scientific problems. These include an underwater in-situ high-resolution benthic microscope and systems for in-situ wide-scale multispectral and fluorescence imaging.
