Papers for

marine archaeology teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Underwater mapping improves by combining sonar and camera data

Multi-Session Multimodal Underwater Mapping with Acoustic and Optical Imaging

Abstract: Accurate seafloor mapping is essential for marine science, archaeology, and environmental monitoring. However, integrating data from different sensors, such as side-scan sonar and optical cameras, collected across separate survey sessions, remains challenging due to positioning drift and sensor offsets. This paper presents a multi-session, multimodal underwater mapping framework based on factor graph optimization. The method jointly optimizes vehicle trajectories, 3D landmark positions, sensor extrinsics, and per-session global alignment transformations. By combining rigid inter-session corrections with local trajectory deformations, it compensates for both inter-session offsets and intra-session distortions from accumulated navigation errors. The proposed methodology was validated on real-world datasets collected along the Catalan coast. Results show measurable improvements in map consistency over both unoptimized and rigid-alignment baselines across all metrics, including Pixel Accuracy and mean Intersection over Union. The method achieves a 3.4% improvement in pixel accuracy over the unoptimized baseline, corresponding to improved semantic labelling across approximately 14700 $\text{m}^2$ of mapped area. Qualitative results further show consistent co-registration between sonar and optical maps, even in the presence of significant trajectory distortions and inter-session misalignments. These findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework to generate coherent multimodal seafloor maps from heterogeneous underwater surveys.

Tue 15 SeptRobotics
The gist
Mapping the ocean floor accurately is important but hard because different sensors and trips can cause errors and misalignment. The authors developed a method that fixes these issues by adjusting data from multiple trips and sensors like sonar and cameras together. Their approach makes the maps more consistent and precise, as shown with real data from the Catalan coast. This helps create better combined maps from different underwater surveys.
Open → 2609.17929v1