Gl. Foresti et al., A VOTING-BASED APPROACH FOR FAST OBJECT RECOGNITION IN UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC IMAGES, IEEE journal of oceanic engineering, 22(1), 1997, pp. 57-65
This paper describes a voting-based approach for the fast automatic re
cognition of man-made objects and related attitude estimation in under
water acoustic images generated by forward-looking sonars or acoustic
cameras, In general, the continuous analysis of sequences of images is
a very heavy task for human operators and this is due to the poor qua
lity of acoustic images, Hence, algorithms able to recognize an object
on the basis of a priori knowledge of the model and to estimate its a
ttitude with reference to a global coordinate system are very useful t
o facilitate underwater operations like object manipulation or vehicle
navigation, The proposed method is capable of recognizing objects and
estimating their two-dimensional attitude by using information coming
from boundary segments and their angular relations, It is based on a
simple voting approach directly applied to the edge discontinuities of
underwater acoustic images, whose quality is usually affected by some
undesired effects such as object blurring, speckle noise, and geometr
ical distortions degrading the edge detection, The voting approach is
robust, with respect to these effects, so that good results are obtain
ed even with images of very poor quality, The sequences of simulated a
nd real acoustic images are presented in order to test the validity of
the proposed method in terms of average estimation error and computat
ional load.