Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yang, Jinghe, Gong, Mingming, Nair, Girish, Lee, Jung Hoon, Monty, Jason, Pu, Ye
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17981
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Table of Contents:
  • In recent years, learning-based feature detection and matching have outperformed manually-designed methods in in-air cases. However, it is challenging to learn the features in the underwater scenario due to the absence of annotated underwater datasets. This paper proposes a cross-modal knowledge distillation framework for training an underwater feature detection and matching network (UFEN). In particular, we use in-air RGBD data to generate synthetic underwater images based on a physical underwater imaging formation model and employ these as the medium to distil knowledge from a teacher model SuperPoint pretrained on in-air images. We embed UFEN into the ORB-SLAM3 framework to replace the ORB feature by introducing an additional binarization layer. To test the effectiveness of our method, we built a new underwater dataset with groundtruth measurements named EASI (https://github.com/Jinghe-mel/UFEN-SLAM), recorded in an indoor water tank for different turbidity levels. The experimental results on the existing dataset and our new dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.