Towards Three-Dimensional Heterogeneous Imaging Sensor Correspondence and Registration for Visualization

The registration and 3D mosaicing of range images presents an interesting challenge for the underwater domain. This work attempts to lay out some of the issues involved in generating large 3D reconstructions of the benthos from two distinct views gathered from an AUV. Specifically, we address using 3D feature correspondence to estimate a Euclidean transformation between views and then refine that estimate to generate visually consistent meshes for human viewing. To achieve this goal we implement spin image feature matching in a pipeline that robustly processes range points to output registered meshes.