Appearance-based odometry and mapping with feature descriptors for underwater robots

The use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for underwater tasks is a promising robotic field. These robots can carry visual inspection cameras. Besides serving the activities of inspection and mapping, the captured images can also be used to aid navigation and localization of the robots. Visual odometry is the process of determining the position and orientation of a robot by analyzing the associated camera images. It has been used in a wide variety of non-standard locomotion robotic methods. In this context, this paper proposes an approach to visual odometry and mapping of underwater veh...