Ice Topography Reconstruction and Panoramic Stitching using Forward Looking Sonar Images

Forward-looking sonar is one of the most common and powerful instruments available for use in imaging underwater environments. Here, we explore the utility of these sonar sensors for mosaicking, mapping and topography reconstruction of areas of interest in our target under-ice and underwater environments. This is a difficult problem due to the noise in the sonar images as well as the changing appearance of objects when views from different points. Here we address the problem of sonar image alignment through sensor fusion with navigation instruments to provide an initial relative placement between sonar frames. We also discuss the use of such forward looking sonar sensors to build 3D point clouds of the ice topography.