Terrain-based Navigation for Underwater Vehicles Using Side Scan Sonar Images

S. Stalder, H. Bleuler and T. Ura, 
presented at the student poster session of the Oceans 2008
[pdf] [poster]

Underwater navigation challenges the research community as a reliable navigation system is unavailable. Correctly matched landmarks could compensate the drift of dead reckoning navigation systems. Furthermore, they could be useful in side scan sonar image registration. We propose to integrate both applications to form one landmark detection and matching system. Our approach detects disruptions in the local texture field using level set evolution on Haralick feature maps. During evolution the landmarks are continuously tried to be matched. An energy term which has been used for supervised image registration is used to verify the hypothesized matches. If the energy term based on pixel-wise similarity and hard landmark constraints is minimum, the landmark matches are considered as correct.