Mosaicing of acoustic camera images

An algorithm for image registration and mosaicing on underwater sonar image sequences characterised by a high noise level, inhomogeneous illumination and low frame rate is presented. Imaging geometry of acoustic cameras is significantly different from that of pinhole cameras. For a planar surface viewed through a pinhole camera undergoing translational and rotational motion, registration can be obtained via a projective transformation. For an acoustic camera, it is shown that, under the same conditions, an affine transformation is a good approximation. A novel image fusion method, which maximises the signal-to-noise ratio of the mosaic image is proposed. The full procedure includes illumination correction, feature based transformation estimation, and image fusion for mosaicing.