Application of image matching to seabed terrain map

Seabed terrain matching is applied to increase the localization accuracy for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). By bicubic B-spline surface interpolation, reference depth map (RDM) is reconstructed to represent actual terrain. A plot is taken from RDM plus white noise to mimic local depth map (LDM). Then two maps are transformed to 8-bit, 256-grey images. In this stage, the two images are matched with correlation, thus image and terrain are connected tightly. Simulation results show that the matching is greatly accurate with certain robusticity, suitable to large seabed terrain areas, including flat and complex regions.