Efficient on-line mosaicing from 3D acoustical images

This paper presents a system for the 3D reconstruction of an underwater environment on the basis of multiple range views from an acoustical camera. The challenge is to provide the reconstruction on-line, as the range views are obtained from the sensor. The final target of the work is to improve the understanding of a human operator driving an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The acoustic camera provides a sequence of 3D images in real time (about 5 fps in the current version). Data must be registered and fused to generate a unique 3D mosaic in the form of a triangle mesh, which is rendered through a graphical interface. Available technologies for registration and meshing have been modified to match time constraints. We report experiments on real data.