3-D reconstruction of the underwater acoustic images using the GPS positioning and the image matching technology

In this paper we focus on how to reconstruct a 3-D structure of the seabed from a spatial series of the 2-D underwater acoustic images. We developed an original method, which uses a combination of the GPS positioning and the image matching technology to synthesize two or more different acoustic images taken from different viewpoints, and then extract the range data from the spatial series of images. According to the relation of the spatial position we can estimate 3-D structure with these range data. We have carried out an experiment with EdgeTech´s DF1000 side-scan sonar and JRC´s DGPS200 GPS in Seto inland sea, Japan, and the result shows the method is valid.