Bathymetric Surveying with Imaging Sonar Using Neural Volume Rendering

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Xie, Yiping, Troni, Giancarlo, Bore, Nils, Folkesson, John
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Xie, Yiping
Troni, Giancarlo
Bore, Nils
Folkesson, John
author_facet Xie, Yiping
Troni, Giancarlo
Bore, Nils
Folkesson, John
contents This research addresses the challenge of estimating bathymetry from imaging sonars where the state-of-the-art works have primarily relied on either supervised learning with ground-truth labels or surface rendering based on the Lambertian assumption. In this letter, we propose a novel, self-supervised framework based on volume rendering for reconstructing bathymetry using forward-looking sonar (FLS) data collected during standard surveys. We represent the seafloor as a neural heightmap encapsulated with a parametric multi-resolution hash encoding scheme and model the sonar measurements with a differentiable renderer using sonar volumetric rendering employed with hierarchical sampling techniques. Additionally, we model the horizontal and vertical beam patterns and estimate them jointly with the bathymetry. We evaluate the proposed method quantitatively on simulation and field data collected by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) during low-altitude surveys. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches that use imaging sonars for seabed mapping. We also demonstrate that the proposed approach can potentially be used to increase the resolution of a low-resolution prior map with FLS data from low-altitude surveys.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_14819
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bathymetric Surveying with Imaging Sonar Using Neural Volume Rendering
Xie, Yiping
Troni, Giancarlo
Bore, Nils
Folkesson, John
Robotics
This research addresses the challenge of estimating bathymetry from imaging sonars where the state-of-the-art works have primarily relied on either supervised learning with ground-truth labels or surface rendering based on the Lambertian assumption. In this letter, we propose a novel, self-supervised framework based on volume rendering for reconstructing bathymetry using forward-looking sonar (FLS) data collected during standard surveys. We represent the seafloor as a neural heightmap encapsulated with a parametric multi-resolution hash encoding scheme and model the sonar measurements with a differentiable renderer using sonar volumetric rendering employed with hierarchical sampling techniques. Additionally, we model the horizontal and vertical beam patterns and estimate them jointly with the bathymetry. We evaluate the proposed method quantitatively on simulation and field data collected by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) during low-altitude surveys. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches that use imaging sonars for seabed mapping. We also demonstrate that the proposed approach can potentially be used to increase the resolution of a low-resolution prior map with FLS data from low-altitude surveys.
title Bathymetric Surveying with Imaging Sonar Using Neural Volume Rendering
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14819