Abstract
In the field of underwater vision, image matching between the main two sensors (sonar and optical camera) has always been a challenging problem. The independent imaging mechanism of the two determines the modalities of the image, and the local features of the images under various modalities are significantly different, which makes the general matching method based on the optical image invalid. In order to make full use of underwater acoustic and optical images, and promote the development of multisensor information fusion (MSIF) technology, this letter proposes to apply an image attribute transfer algorithm and advanced local feature descriptor to solve the problem of underwater acousto-optic image matching. We utilize real and simulated underwater images for testing; experimental results show that our proposed method could effectively preprocess these multimodal images to obtain an accurate matching result, thus providing a new solution for the underwater multisensor image matching task.
Highlights
In recent years, many organizations have gradually begun to obtain resources such as oil and gas from the deep sea to meet the needs of human and industrial sustainable development
We introduce the number of good matches (GM), average number of inliers (INL)
GM measures the robustness, INL and matching accuracy (MA) measure the accuracy of the algorithm, and running time (RT) measures the real-time performance of the algorithm
Summary
Many organizations have gradually begun to obtain resources such as oil and gas from the deep sea to meet the needs of human and industrial sustainable development. Current mainstream deep-submersibles, such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are equipped with more advanced acoustic and optical sensors. These sensors have played an outstanding role in seabed geomorphological mapping, target recognition and classification, biological research, resource exploration, environmental monitoring, and other fields [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Sonar is the most commonly used sensor in the field of deep-water exploration, which could collect images of marine targets at a relatively long distance and is not disturbed by turbidity. It encounters special cases in the imaging process, such as low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), low resolution, and low feature repeatability [6]
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