Registration of multiple acoustic range views for underwater scene reconstruction

This paper proposes a technique for the three-dimensional reconstruction of an underwater environment from multiple acoustic range views acquired by a remotely operated vehicle. The problem is made challenging by the very noisy nature of the data, the low resolution, and the narrow field of view. Our main contribution is a new global registration technique to distribute registration errors evenly across all views. Our approach does not use data points after the first pairwise registration, for it works only on the transformations. Therefore, it is fast and occupies only a small amount of memory. Experimental results suggest the global registration technique is effective in equalizing the error. Moreover, we introduce a statistically sound thresholding (the X84 rejection rule) to improve ICP robustness against noise and nonoverlapping data. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).