Real-time mosaicing of large scale areas with forward looking sonar

Abstract

Mosaicing of large scale areas is an important application in the field of underwater computer vision. Although most of the works use optical cameras for that purpose, Forward Looking Sonars, also called acoustic cameras, are becoming more popular due to recent advances with respect to resolution. Mapping a large area in real-time can be extremely important in certain applications such as search and rescue, postdisaster survey, surveillance or automatic target detection. In particular, the possibility of having a map created in real-time of the surveyed area can diminish the Post-Mission Analysis time and allow mission replanning. Results obtained for a marina dataset are hereby presented and the possible applications of this work are discussed.