Automatic Sea-Surface Obstacle Detection and Tracking in Forward-Looking Sonar Image Sequences
Résumé
Automatic sea-surface object detection and tracking
for safe autonomous underwater vehicle and submarine surfacing
is a critical issue in relation to the accidents reported in the last
decades. Here, we propose an efficient tool to detect and track
sea-surface obstacles by processing forward-looking sonar images.
The proposed method can detect either still or moving objects with
and without wake. For each image sequence, a sequential procedure
is proposed to detect various obstacle signatures. Then, target
positions and velocities are estimated in Cartesian coordinates
using the debiased converted measurement Kalman filter and the
joint probabilistic data association filter. Detection and tracking
stages exchange information in order to reduce the number of false
alarms. Promising results are obtained using real data collected at
sea with various objects and scenarios.