Research on a high-precision real-time 3D sonar image registration algorithm

An effective improved ICP algorithm for sonar point cloud registration is proposed. Through the coarse registration based on GPS and attitude instrument, the iteration times of ICP registration can be reduced; By mapping the sonar point cloud coordinates to the beam and distance coordinates and setting the threshold of the beam region to search, we only search for the points which are in the region to find the nearest point as the corresponding point, which greatly reduces the number of points to be compared in each iteration. Thus, the efficiency of ICP registration is effectively accelerated. Experiments show that the algorithm can improve the efficiency by 15-20 times.