A Vision System for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

A vision system for our PISCIS project is described. This is a proposed project for the use of an untethered autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for pipeline inspection. The vision system is termed PVS (the PISCIS vision system). It will assist the AUV in finding and following pipelines. A salient feature of the PVS is that it is designed to find all pipelines within the field of view and, thus, the AUV can follow any of them. Robust image interpretation is important as humans can not interact with the PVS and correct errors. Furthermore, the image quality is reduced by backscatter, light absorption, a non-uniform background (the sea-bed), and marine material on the pipelines. The PVS is fixed to a vehicle and must rely on a heading sensor and an altitude sonar to match image features with pipeline models. The models are retrieved from a map based on the vehicle’s position.