Seabed modeling and distractor extraction for mobile AUVs using light field filtering

A method is presented for isolating moving distractors from a static background in imagery captured by a hovering or slowly moving Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). By reparameterizing a set of monocular images into a light field structure, it becomes possible to apply a linear fan filter and its inverse to extract the background and distractors, respectively. Results are shown for a hovering AUV imaging a region with non-trivial 3D structure and containing moving elements. The output is a distractor-free 3D light field model of the sea floor and a set of images of isolated distractors. We show that the technique is insensitive to parallax in the background elements, outperforming pixel differencing techniques.