DUGi

Efficient image mosaicing for multi-robot visual underwater mapping

http://dugi.udg.edu/item/http:@@@@hdl.handle.net@@2072@@295603

Robotic platforms have advanced greatly in terms of their remote sensing capabilities, including obtaining optical information using cameras. Alongside these advances, visual mapping has become a very active research area, which facilitates the mapping of areas inaccessible to humans. This requires the efficient processing of data to increase the final mosaic quality and computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose an efficient image mosaicing algorithm for large area visual mapping in underwater environments using multiple underwater robots. Our method identifies overlapping image pairs in the trajectories carried out by the different robots during the topology estimation process, being this a cornerstone for efficiently mapping large areas of the seafloor. We present comparative results based on challenging real underwater datasets, which simulated multi-robot mapping

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (2012R1A1A1015307) and partly by the Human Resources Development program (No. 20134030200300) of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant funded by the Korea government Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. It was also partially funded through European Union projects FP7-ICT-2011-288704 (MORPH) and FP7-312762 (EUROFLEETS2) as well as under grant CTM2010-15216 (MuMap) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCINN)

Elsevier