Real-time mosaicing with two-dimensional forward-looking sonar

Forward-looking sonar can be used for underwater mapping when water visibility is poor. The generation of an acoustic mosaic of the environment is of high interest when underwater vehicles are used for surveys or search tasks. Moreover, if the mosaic is generated in real-time it can be used to provide instantaneous location feedback (e.g. to a ROV pilot or to an AUV), to ensure complete coverage of an area or facilitate the immediate location of targets. In this paper, we present an approach for achieving such a real-time mosaicing capability. Our system considers a simplified imaging model and estimates 2D sonar motions from the pairwise registration of sonar frames. The registration is performed by using a Fourier-based technique, avoiding the extraction of features and ensuring a fast implementation. The mosaicing problem is formulated using a pose graph, with the vertices being the sonar image positions and the edges being constraints from the vehicle odometry and the registration of consecutive and non-consecutive frames. The graph is incrementally optimized using the g2o framework and the optimized poses are then used to build the mosaic online. We apply the method on data gathered on real conditions and show that the resulting sonar mosaic closely matches both the offline generated mosaic as well as ground truth measurements while operating under real-time constraints.