Towards image-based characterization of acoustic navigation

Abstract

This paper examines the role of image-based navigation in the context of characterizing the standard long baseline navigation used by underwater vehicles for survey applications. Our work is based on looking at the displacement estimate that can be derived from registering overlapping imagery of the seafloor. Our approach is realistic in that it does not require large overlap and in that it can handle translational and rotational motions between image pairs in an unstructured terrain. We demonstrate our approach on a photographic survey conducted by the Argo towed vehicle covering several square kilometers off of Guam in the Pacific Ocean over a period of almost two months.