Spatio-temporal 3D terrain modeling and visualization based on measuring data of AUV

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is more and more applied in the mission of AUV terrain reconnaissance. At the same time, sensors especial oceanography measuring sensors data´s processing and utilizing is important to the oceanography research and resource exploitation usages of AUV. This paper discusses methods of 3D terrain vector modeling and its visualizing based on multi-beam sonar. In this paper, sensors data are used to provide the absolute coordinate points of terrain. An improved Delaunay triangulation modeling algorithm is designed to set up the vector model of terrain. And the visual 3D model is demonstrated on the platform of Visual C++ and OpenGL, and it could be applied to continuous data processing and analysis for oceanographic terrain reconnaissance.