Determination of Horizontal Motion through Optical Flow Computations

For intelligent / antonomous subsea vehicles, reliable short-range horizontal positioning is difficult to achieve, particularly over flat bottom topography.A potential solution proposed in this paper utilizes a passive optical sensing method to estimate the vehicle displacement using the bottom surface texture.The suggested optical flow method does not require any feature correspondeuces in images and it is robust in allowing brightness changes between image frames. Fundamentallyt this method is similar to …