Underwater archaeological mosaicing

Abstract

Archaeological mosaicing is one of the challenges of the computer vision community and it can be faced in a 2D or 3D approach. This contribution regards a methodology to do a mosaic of an underwater bi-dimensional scene. A number of problems arise from the acquisition of images by a remote operated vehicle. Radial distortion, poor luminosity, cloud water, presence of artefacts are part of the issues that can occur; for instance, the radial distortion has been corrected to improve the quality of the input images. Keypoints detection (through SIFT transform), Singular Value Decomposition, Random Samples Consensus are some of the techniques applied in our method. This contribution regards the mosaicing of seabed landscapes, in order to represent higher resolution photos of whole sites with wrecks in a fast and safe fashion. A stereo vision system has been arranged by adding two cameras to the payload aboard a Remotely Operated Vehicle. A number of problems arise due to poor luminosity, cloudy water, water distortion and presence of artifacts. A robust algorithm has been de¯ned to reduce the radial distortion of the camera lenses and to enhance the results.