Real-time estimation of dominant motion in underwater video images for dynamic positioning

We propose a 2D visual motion estimation method which can be exploited to achieve a dynamic positioning (e.g. by gaze control) with respect to a sea-bottom area of interest of a video camera mounted on a subsea vehicle. It mainly involves a dominant 2D motion robust estimation step from underwater video sequences. Optimizations carried out on the motion estimation code have made possible the use of our algorithm in “application-related real-time” for scientific exploration or inspection tasks. We have developed a friendly and efficient interface to perform this algorithm in an operational context. Experiments dealing with complex real underwater scenes are reported and validate the approach