Vision-based system of AUV for an underwater pipeline tracker

This paper describes a new framework for detection and tracking of underwater pipeline,which includes software system and hardware system.It is designed for vision system of AUV based on monocular CCD camera.First,the real-time data flow from image capture card is pre-processed and pipeline features are extracted for navigation.The region saturation degree is advanced to remove false edge point group after Sobel operation.An appropriate way is proposed to clear the disturbance around the peak point in the process of Hough transform.Second,the continuity of pipeline layout is taken into account to improve the efficiency of line extraction.Once the line information has been obtained,the reference zone is predicted by Kalman filter.It denotes the possible appearance position of the pipeline in the image.Kalman filter is used to estimate this position in next frame so that the information of pipeline of each frame can be known in advance.Results obtained on real optic vision data in tank experiment are displayed and discussed.They show that the proposed system can detect and track the underwater pipeline online,and is effective and feasible.