VISO: Robust Underwater Visual-Inertial-Sonar SLAM with Photometric Rendering for Dense 3D Reconstruction

TL;DR

VISO is a robust underwater SLAM system that combines stereo vision, IMU, and 3D sonar with photometric rendering to improve localization accuracy and enable real-time dense 3D reconstruction in challenging underwater environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel underwater SLAM system integrating multi-sensor fusion with a photometric rendering strategy for enhanced mapping and localization.

Findings

Outperforms existing underwater SLAM algorithms in robustness and accuracy.

Enables real-time dense 3D reconstruction with high photometric fidelity.

Validated in laboratory and open lake environments.

Abstract

Visual challenges in underwater environments significantly hinder the accuracy of vision-based localisation and the high-fidelity dense reconstruction. In this paper, we propose VISO, a robust underwater SLAM system that fuses a stereo camera, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a 3D sonar to achieve accurate 6-DoF localisation and enable efficient dense 3D reconstruction with high photometric fidelity. We introduce a coarse-to-fine online calibration approach for extrinsic parameters estimation between the 3D sonar and the camera. Additionally, a photometric rendering strategy is proposed for the 3D sonar point cloud to enrich the sonar map with visual information. Extensive experiments in a laboratory tank and an open lake demonstrate that VISO surpasses current state-of-the-art underwater and visual-based SLAM algorithms in terms of localisation robustness and accuracy, while also exhibiting real-time dense 3D reconstruction performance comparable to the offline dense mapping method.