Augmented reality by integrating multiple sensory modalities for underwater scene understanding

This paper proposes a method for the integration of acoustic and optical data to enhance the perception of an underwater environment in teleoperation tasks. Off-shore applications are addressed, in which an underwater remotely operated vehicle is approaching an oil rig for inspection, maintenance and repairing tasks. A technique is presented which takes advantage of optical features to segment an acoustic three-dimensional image. Cylindrical surfaces are than extracted from 3-D points, and whole cylinders are reconstructed. The final step is to present useful information to the human operator, by displaying the superposition of measured acoustic data and geometric primitives fitted to parts of it, i.e. an augmented reality view. Experimental results are reported showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach