A mosaicking technique for object identification in underwater environments

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to present a mosaicking method for underwater robotic applications, whose result can be provided to other perceptual systems for scene understanding such as real-time object recognition.Design/methodology/approachThis method is called robust and large-scale mosaicking (ROLAMOS) and presents an efficient frame-to-frame motion estimation with outlier removal and consistency checking that maps large visual areas in high resolution. The visual mosaic of the sea-floor is created on-the-fly by a robust registration procedure that composes monocular observations and manages the computational resources. Moreover, the registration process of ROLAMOS aligns the observation to the existing mosaic.FindingsA comprehensive set of experiments compares the performance of ROLAMOS to other similar approaches, using both data sets (publicly available) and live data obtained by a ROV operating in real scenes. The results demonstrate that ROLAMOS is adequate for mapping of sea-floor scenarios as it provides accurate information from the seabed, which is of extreme importance for autonomous robots surveying the environment that does not rely on specialized computers.Originality/valueThe ROLAMOS is suitable for robotic applications that require an online, robust and effective technique to reconstruct the underwater environment from only visual information.