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Online underwater optical mapping for trajectories with gaps

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Abstract

This paper proposes a vision-only online mosaicing method for underwater surveys. Our method tackles a common problem in low-cost imaging platforms, where complementary navigation sensors produce imprecise or even missing measurements. Under these circumstances, the success of the optical mapping depends on the continuity of the acquired video stream. However, this continuity cannot be always guaranteed due to the motion blurs or lack of texture, common in underwater scenarios. Such temporal gaps hinder the extraction of reliable motion estimates from visual odometry, and compromise the ability to infer the presence of loops for producing an adequate optical map. Unlike traditional underwater mosaicing methods, our proposal can handle camera trajectories with gaps between time-consecutive images. This is achieved by constructing minimum spanning tree which verifies whether the current topology is connected or not. To do so, we embed a trajectory estimate correction step based on graph theory algorithms. The proposed method was tested with several different underwater image sequences and results were presented to illustrate the performance.

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Notes

  1. Identity mapping is no rotation (0 degree with respect to the chosen global frame), no translation and scale equals to 1.

  2. The first image frame is usually considered as a global frame in the absence of any other relevant information.

  3. http://www.ifremer.fr/biocean/acces_gb/rapports/Appel_2cruisefr.htql?numcruise=203. Accessed on August 25th, 2015.

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Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments. This research was supported by the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning), Korea, under the IT Consilience Creative Program (IITP-2015-R0346-15-1008) supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency), the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (2013062644) and was a part of the project titled ‘Development of an autonomous ship-hull inspection system’ funded by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, Korea. It was also partially funded through MINECO (grant number CTM2013-46718-R), the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme as part of the project Eurofleets2 (grant number FP7-INF-2012-312762), and Generalitat de Catalunya through the ACCIO/TecnioSpring program (TECSPR14-1-0050)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Integrated Technology, Yonsei Institute of Convergence Technology, Yonsei University, Incheon, Republic of Korea

    Armagan Elibol & Hyunjung Shim

  2. Robotics Program, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Seonghun Hong & Jinwhan Kim

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Jinwhan Kim

  4. Computer Vision and Robotics Research Institute, University of Girona, Girona, Spain

    Nuno Gracias & Rafael Garcia

Authors
  1. Armagan Elibol
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  2. Hyunjung Shim
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  3. Seonghun Hong
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  4. Jinwhan Kim
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  5. Nuno Gracias
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  6. Rafael Garcia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Armagan Elibol.

Additional information

Armagan Elibol’s present address is Department of Mathematical Engineering, Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, aelibol@yildiz.edu.tr.

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Elibol, A., Shim, H., Hong, S. et al. Online underwater optical mapping for trajectories with gaps. Intel Serv Robotics 9, 217–229 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-016-0195-4

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