A method for estimating the motion of a marine Remotely Operated Vehicle using an underwater vision system

This paper outlines a methodology for estimating translational and rotational velocities in the 2D plane using a vision system in near seabed operations. The feature detection across consecutive camera frames is done using the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) in Matlab. The estimated translational and rotational velocities from this vision based motion detection system can be used as aiding for inertial navigation systems, e.g. iXsea Photonic Inertial Navigation System (PHINS), to improve the near sea bed navigation performance for Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs).