Ocean floor mapping using video is a method to simply and cost-effectively record large areas of the seafloor. Obtaining visual and elevation models has noteworthy applications in search and recovery missions. Hazards to navigation are abundant and pose a significant threat to the safety, effectiveness, and speed of naval operations and commercial vessels. This project’s objective was to develop a workflow to automatically extract metadata from marine video and create image optical and elevation surface mosaics. Three developments made this possible. First, optical character recognition (OCR) by means of two-dimensional correlation, using a known character set, allowed for the capture of metadata from image files. Second, exploiting the image metadata (i.e., latitude, longitude, heading, camera angle, and depth readings) allowed for the determination of location and orientation of the image frame in mosaic. Image registration improved the accuracy of mosaicking. Finally, overlapping data allowed us to determine height information. A disparity map was created using the parallax from overlapping viewpoints of a given area and the relative height data was utilized to create a three-dimensional, textured elevation map.

Date Published: 17 May 2016
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9827, Ocean Sensing and Monitoring VIII, 98270C (17 May 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2223774

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9827:
Ocean Sensing and Monitoring VIII
Weilin W. Hou; Robert A. Arnone, Editor(s)