Forward-looking sonar mosaicing for underwater environments

• Autores: Natàlia Hurtós Vilarnau
• Directores de la Tesis: Joaquim Salvi Mas (dir. tes.), Xavier Cufí i Soler (dir. tes.), Yvan Petillot (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Girona ( España ) en 2014
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Andreas Brik (presid.), Nuno Gracias (secret.), Hanumant Singh (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencias tecnológicas
    • Tecnología electrónica
      • Dispositivos de sonar
    • Tecnología naval
      • Vehículos submarinos
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
• Resumen

  • Vehicle operations in underwater environments are frequently compromised by poor visibility conditions. In this thesis, we propose an end-to-end mosaicing framework tailored to the characteristics of forward-looking sonar imagery in order to build consistent overviews of planar underwater areas regardless of water visibility. Our solution targets versatility: it enables the generation of acoustic mosaics that involve roto-translational motions and comprise different vehicle tracklines, it is suitable for a wide range of scenarios, it can be applicable on data collected with minimally instrumented vehicles, and it allows both offline and real-time operation. To this end, we address the key problem of image registration on forward-looking sonar images and we provide solutions for the global alignment of the sonar frames along the trajectory as well as their blending into a smooth acoustic mosaic. To validate the full proposed framework, an extensive experimental section is reported showing successful results in relevant field applications.