Past Research

Sponsors: W. M. Keck Foundation , National Science Foundation Project Overview:  Micro-scale activities drive many important changes in marine ecosystems and ideally such processes should be observed in the natural environment. The Benthic Underwater Microscope (BUM) is a diver operated instrument designed in the Jaffe Lab to take microscopic images and video of seafloor environments such as coral reefs.

Sponsors :  National Science Foundation , The California Sea Grant, The German Ministry for Education and Research through the “Red Sea Program” and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation Project Overview : Despite the importance of u...

Sponsors: W. M. Keck Foundation Project Overview: There is a great need in microscopy and especially in situ, underwater microscopy to study behavior and interactions of organisms in a their natural fluid environment. This precludes the use of traditional microscopy techniques that prepare specimens on a slide or image z-stacks through immobilized 3D volumes. To address some of these limitations the Keck In Situ Underwater Microscope  was designed to record video of a 3D volume (a cubic centimeter for example) with sufficient resolution for taxa identification and 3D localization with resolution on the order of microns.

Sponsors: Office of Naval Research Project Overview: A Microbathymetric Laser Imaging System: The submersible laser bathymetric (LBath) optical system is capable of simultaneously providing visual images and generating bathymetric maps of the sea floor with centimeter spatial and depth resolution. The system operates at roughly 10 m above the sea floor and builds a bathymetric image by taking successive swaths of the sea floor as the system moves through the water as either a towed or an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The system has been designed with the specific purpose of remotely identifying semi-submerged mines in turbid coastal waters.

Sponsor:  National Science Foundation Project Overview: The Low-Light-Level Underwater, Multispectral Imaging System-2 is a portable, multispectral, dive camera, designed for rapid in situ fluorescence surveys of coral reefs at multiple emission ...

Sponsors : Office of Naval Research Project Overview: The OmniCam is an omnidirectional, high resolution, high speed, underwater imaging system designed to record the radiometric light field in the open ocean. These data are important in understanding...

Sponsors:  Jaffe Laboratory for Underwater Imaging and UCSD Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Project Overview: This project aims to design and build small (around 1 liter volume) inexpensive open source AUVs that can be easily constructed ...

Sponsors: National Science Foundation Project Overview:  There is a great need in many scientific applications to be able to accurately size sub-micron particles. As the particle size decreases to be smaller than the wavelength of light it becomes ...

Sponsors: Seaver Foundation National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (RO1 AI46600) Project Overview: Our understanding of the significance of microbes in the ocean has improved dramatically over the last decade. However there...

Sponsors: Office of Naval Research Project Overview: To support Navy imaging operations in turbid waters, the Jaffe laboratory has been working for several decades on developing advanced laser imaging systems to improve image contrast and range...

Project Overview: This project aims to create visually convincing images of copepods to demonstrate individual behaviors in a research or educational setting. Jump to animations Authors: Celeste Fowler , Scripps Institution of Oceanography Dr. Jeannette Yen , School of Biology , Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. Jules Jaffe  Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Sponsors: National Science Foundation Project Overview: The VRMacroscopic is a custom built opto-mechnical system that can capture 360 degree stereoscopic panoramic timelapse videos of microscopic scenes and generate stitched frames in realtime.  When the content is viewed in a virtual reality environment (headset or immersive theatre) the effect experienced by the viewer is that of becoming a miniature explorer, approximately 5mm in size, and placed in the center of the microscopic scene.  Since the system records time-lapse videos the viewer can explore typically invisible phenomena through novel manipulations of both time and space.

Sponsor:  National Science Foundation Project Overview: The ZOOplankton Sonar (ZOOPS) is a multiview, multimodal acoustic and optical zooplankton sonar system. It combines multiple, broadband acoustic sensors with a high-resolution camera ...