Stability analysis of submarine pipelines based on 3D model reconstruction

Due to the scouring of bottom turbulent currents, the submarine pipelines on the soft seabed become exposed or unsupported so that they will be instable. The conventional methods for inspecting the submarine pipelines are inadequate and unprecise to reveal the actual status of submarine pipelines. It makes it difficult to analyze the safety of the pipelines. Therefore, a new method for inspecting the status of submarine pipelines is proposed to obtain their precise status information, where the surveying data collected by side-scan sonar, sub-bottom profiler and multi-beam bathymetric systems are integrated together to make precise visual 3D models and to determine the spatial position information of the submarine pipelines. Based on the precise visual 3D models and the spatial position information, the stability analysis is then conducted on the 3D models to evaluate the reliability of the pipelines at different parts.