A robust image stitching approach for underwater flexible joint inspection

Different underwater assets need to be inspected by robots due to the difficulty of accessing their environment. Photomosaics can be used as a resource for inspections, as they provide a larger field of view from the objects. Despite the usual underwater challenges, flexible joints make the stitching process difficult, due to its structure. This paper presents a new stitching pipeline, using different known methods in the literature, as Structure from Motion and 3D texturing methods, to overcome the described limitations, with a robust approach even for low feature matchings scenarios. The visual results demonstrate the approach efficiency, as different methods in literature could no represent the entire inspection object, or perform it inappropriately.