Sonar-based Cable Detection for in-situ Calibration of Marine Sensors

In-situ calibration of marine sensors requires close-range positioning. In turn, localization relative to a given object of interest is necessary. This paper deals with the detection of a vertical cable hanging from a marine observatory implemented by means of a moored buoy. An algorithm composed of sequential image filtering, segmentation and template matching is proposed. Two approaches for generating the cable’s acoustic image template are introduced. The performance of the approaches, obtained by comparison with ground-truth measurements, are illustrated over challenging cluttered acoustic images collected in a test tank. The results indicate a performance better than 74% of the best candidate to match the actual cable.