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Advances In Fusion Of High Resolution Underwater Optical And Acoustic Data, H. Singh, C. Roman, L. Whitcomb, D. Yoerger

Christopher N. Roman

We report efforts to merge data from the complementary modalities of optical and acoustic sensing for obtaining more accurate representations of the seafloor. We show that the principal obstacles to merging the acoustic and optical imaging modalities are the distortions inherent to each modality. The construction of geometrically accurate photomosaics is dominated by incremental errors arising as individual images are scaled and warped to form the photomosaic. For microbathymetric mapping, principal errors arise from sensor position and orientation calibration parameters that affect our ability to construct maps from sonar data that are commensurate with sensor and navigation resolution. We show …