An Underwater Localization Method Based on Visual SLAM for the Near-Bottom Environment

Abstract

The feature matching of the near-bottom visual SLAM is influenced by underwater raised sediments, resulting in tracking loss. In this paper, the novel visual SLAM system is proposed in the underwater raised sediments environment. The underwater images are firstly classified based on the color recognition method by adding the weights of pixel location to reduce the interference of similar colors on the seabed. The improved adaptive median filter method is proposed to filter the classified images by using the mean value of the filter window border as the discriminant condition to retain the original features of the image. The filtered images are finally processed by the tracking module to obtain the trajectory of underwater vehicles and the seafloor maps. The datasets of seamount areas captured in the western Pacific Ocean are processed by the improved visual SLAM system. The keyframes, mapping points, and feature point matching pairs extracted from the improved visual SLAM system are improved by 5.2%, 11.2%, and 4.5% compared with that of the ORB-SLAM3 system, respectively. The improved visual SLAM system has the advantage of robustness to dynamic disturbances, which is of practical application in underwater vehicles operated in near-bottom areas such as seamounts and nodules.

Keywords

• underwater visual SLAM
• underwater raised sediments environment
• image pre-processing
• color recognition
• adaptive median filter