Underwater Wireless Sensor Network-Based Delaunay Triangulation (UWSN-DT) Algorithm for Sonar Map Fusion

Abstract Robust and fast image recognition and matching is an important task in the underwater domain. The primary focus of this work is on extracting subsea features with sonar sensor for further Autonomous Underwater Vehicle navigation, such as the robotic localization and landmark mapping applications. With the assistance of high-resolution underwater features in the Side Scan Sonar (SSS) images, an efficient feature detector and descriptor, Speeded Up Robust Feature, is employed to seabed sonar image fusion task. In order to solve the nonlinear intensity difference problem in SSS images, the main novelty of this work is the proposed Underwater Wireless Sensor Network-based Delaunay Triangulation (UWSN-DT) algorithm for improving the performances of sonar map fusion accuracy with low computational complexity, in which the wireless nodes are considered as underwater feature points, since nodes could provide sufficiently useful information for the underwater map fusion, such as the location. In the simulated experiments, it shows that the presented UWSN-DT approach works efficiently and robustly, especially for the subsea environments where there are few distinguishable feature points.