Virtual environment generation by CAD-based methodology for underwater vehicle navigation

Perception. We describe a recognition framework to generate a virtual environment through CAD-based vision techniques from optical data. Descriptions of objects of the environment in terms of aspect graphs, and suitable recognition strategies for them are compiled off-line. A relational graph of image features is obtained on-line by processing optical data, and matching occurs between such a graph, and descriptions of objects in the framed scene. Multiresolution techniques are used in order to adapt recognition strategies to the distance and relevance of objects within the field of view.