Omnidirectional underwater surveying and telepresence

Exploratory dives are traditionally the first step for marine scientists to acquire information on a previously unknown area of scientific interest. Manned submersibles have been the platform of choice for such exploration, as they allow a high level of environmental perception by the scientist on-board, and the ability to take informed decisions on what to explore next. However, manned submersibles have extremely high operation costs and provide very limited bottom time. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) can partially address these two issues, but have operational and cost constraints that restrict their usage. This paper discusses new capabilities to assist scientists operating lightweight hybrid remotely operated vehicles (HROV) in exploratory missions of mapping and surveying. The new capabilities, under development within the Spanish National project OMNIUS, provide a new layer of autonomy for HROVs by exploring three key concepts: Omni-directional optical sensing for collaborative immersive exploration, Proximity safety awareness and Online mapping during mission time.Peer Reviewe

Image Mosaicing for Wide Angle Panorama

Images are integral part in our daily lives. With a normal camera it is not possible to get a wide angle panorama with high resolution. Image Mosaicing is one of the novel techniques, for combining two or more images of the same scene taken in different views into one image. In the dark areas, the obtained image is a panoramic image with high resolution without mask. But in the case of lighting areas, the resultant image is generating mask. In order to gets wide angle panorama, in the existing system, extracting feature points, finding the best stitching line, Cluster Analysis (CA) and Dynamic Programming (DP) methods are used. Also used Weighted Average (WA) method for smooth stitching results and also eliminate intensity seam effectively. In the proposed system, to get feature extraction and feature matching SIFT (Scaled Invariant Feature Transform) algorithm used. In this process, outliers can be generated. RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) is used for detecting the outliers from the resultant image. Masking is significantly reduced by using Algebraic Reconstruction Techniques (ART)

An in Depth Review Paper on Numerous Image Mosaicing Approaches and Techniques

Image mosaicing is one of the most important subjects of research in computer vision at current. Image mocaicing requires the integration of direct techniques and feature based techniques. Direct techniques are found to be very useful for mosaicing large overlapping regions, small translations and rotations while feature based techniques are useful for small overlapping regions. Feature based image mosaicing is a combination of corner detection, corner matching, motion parameters estimation and image stitching.Furthermore, image mosaicing is considered the process of obtaining a wider field-of-view of a scene from a sequence of partial views, which has been an attractive research area because of its wide range of applications, including motion detection, resolution enhancement, monitoring global land usage, and medical imaging. Numerous algorithms for image mosaicing have been proposed over the last two decades.In this paper the authors present a review on different approaches for image mosaicing and the literature over the past few years in the field of image masaicing methodologies. The authors take an overview on the various methods for image mosaicing.This review paper also provides an in depth survey of the existing image mosaicing algorithms by classifying them into several groups. For each group, the fundamental concepts are first clearly explained. Finally this paper also reviews and discusses the strength and weaknesses of all the mosaicing groups

Novel Image Mosaic Algorithm for Concrete Pavement Surface Image Reconstruction

AbstractIn this paper, a novel image mosaic method for concrete pavement surface image sequences reconstruction has been proposed. Harris corner points are extracted uniformly from the overlapped areas of concrete pavement surface images, which are considered feature points. The commonly used circular projection method is applied for coarse matching step and an improved point matching method is proposed for invariance of image rotation and distortion. The image fusion strategy of fading in and fading out is employed for the smooth and seamless of mosaic image. For the practical pavement surface images, which exists rotation and distortion, the corresponding experimental results show that the proposed image matching method has higher precision and stronger robustness