Image registration underwater for fluid flow measurements and mosaicking

The authors present a unified framework of increasing complexity that handles image registration ranging from translation only motion between images, to a full eight parameter projective transformation. Their formulation deals specifically with the constraints that are peculiar to these applications underwater. To examine the role of translation only motion across images they look at video imagery from fluid flow across a flange at a hydrothermal vent site in Guaymas Basin in Mexico. They then show the extensions to this algorithm that are required to handle the case for 2D mosaicing, which involves translations, rotations, scale, and shear in an unstructured three dimensional underwater world. Finally, they show the effectiveness of these techniques on data acquired during photographic surveys of an ancient Roman shipwreck located in the Skerki Bank region in ~800 m of water in the Mediterranean