A scale-adaptive matching algorithm for underwater acoustic and optical images

Underwater acoustic and optical data fusion has been developed in recent decades. Matching of underwater acoustic and optical images is a fundamental and critical problem in underwater exploration because it usually acts as the key step in many applications, such as target detection, ocean observation, and joint positioning. In this study, a method of matching the same underwater object in acoustic and optical images was designed, consisting of two steps. First, an enhancement step is used to enhance the images and ensure the accuracy of the matching results based on iterative processing and estimate similarity. The acoustic and optical images are first pre-processed with the aim of eliminating the influence of contrast degradation, contour blur, and image noise. A method for image enhancement was designed based on iterative processing. In addition, a new similarity estimation method for acoustic and optical images is also proposed to provide the enhancement effect. Second, a matching step is used to accurately find the corresponding object in the acoustic images that appears in the underwater optical images. In the matching process, a correlation filter is applied to determine the correlation for matching between images. Due to the differences of angle and imaging principle between underwater optical and acoustic images, there may be major differences of size between two images of the same object. In order to eliminate the effect of these differences, we introduce the Gaussian scale-space, which is fused with multi-scale detection to determine the matching results. Therefore, the algorithm is insensitive to scale differences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed method in matching acoustic and optical images.