Invited talk "High-resolution Sea-floor Optical Mapping using Unmanned Underwater Vehicles"

Abstract:

Robotics has greatly advanced in the last few years as a tool for environmental monitoring and seafloor characterization. Seafloor imagery is routinely acquired during near-bottom mapping surveys conducted by Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs). Deep-sea hydrothermal fields or shallow-water coral reef communities are, for instance, two scenarios that have long been the target of such studies. Imagery is useful to characterize the nature and distribution of geological features and biological communities, extract ecological indicators, and to provide a permanent visual record of the seafloor condition. However, imaging studies often yield large numbers of images (several tens of thousands, especially in deep-sea cruises) that are frequently underutilized largely because of the difficulties inherent in processing and visualizing large data sets. Moreover, light suffers from a rapid and nonlinear attenuation underwater that affects the acquired images, which forces AUVs to navigate close to the seafloor, thus increasing the risk of the survey mission.

In this talk we will present ongoing work at the University of Girona towards development and application of vision-based seafloor survey methodologies, including large area 2D mosaicing (>1sqkm), monocular-based 3D mosaicing, and omnidirectional mapping.  The developed tools set a first step towards detecting and documenting the temporal variations associated with the active processes operating at these sites.

CV:

RAFAEL GARCIA graduated in computer engineering in June 1994 at the Autonoma University of Barcelona (UAB), received the DEA (MSc) in Computer Science in July 1996 and the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering in 2001, both at the University of Girona (UdG), Spain. His research activity mainly focuses on robotics in topics such as robot navigation and mapping, sensor fusion, 3D reconstruction, semantic representation of video imagery and large-scale mosaicing. Dr. Garcia was the director of the Computer Vision and Robotics Group (VICOROB) of the University of Girona from March 2009 to June 2015. Currently, he is the director of the Underwater Vision Lab, which belongs to VICOROB. Dr. Garcia has been visiting researcher at the Universität der Bundeswehr (Germany), University College Cork (Ireland), IRISA-INRIA (France), and the University of Miami (USA). He is involved in several national and transnational projects in the field of robotics and computer vision and has participated in the creation of two spin-off companies.