Linear global mosaics for underwater surveying

Omnidirectional Underwater Surveying and Telepresence

Exploratory dives are traditionally the first step for marine scientists to acquire information on a previously unknown area of scientific interest. Manned submersibles have been the platform of choice for such exploration, as they allow a high level of environmental perception by the scientist on-board, and the ability to take informed decisions on what to explore next. However, manned submers...

Underwater Video Mosaics as Visual Navigation Maps

This paper presents a set of algorithms for the creation of underwater mosaics and illustrates their use as visual maps for underwater vehicle navigation. First, we describe the automatic creation of video mosaics, which deals with the problem of image motion estimation in a robust and automatic way. The motion estimation is based on a initial matching of corresponding areas over pairs of image...

Using vision for underwater robotics: video mosaics and station keeping

In this paper we discuss the use of vision for underwater vehicles. The work described here has been developed in the context of the European Research Project NARVAL Navigation of Autonomous vehicles via Active Environmental Perception (ESPRIT-LTR project 30185), aiming at designing and implementing reliable navigation systems of limited cost for mobile robots in unstructured environments, with...

NAVSTAR Global Positioning System Surveying

Trajectory-Based Visual Localization in Underwater Surveying Missions

We present a new vision-based localization system applied to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with limited sensing and computation capabilities. The traditional EKF-SLAM approaches are usually expensive in terms of execution time; the approach presented in this paper strengthens this method by adopting a trajectory-based schema that reduces the computational requirements. The pose of the ...