Real-time Image Enhancement for Vision-based Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation in Murky Waters

Classic vision-based navigation solutions, which are utilized in algorithms such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), usually fail to work underwater when the water is murky and the quality of the recorded images is low. That is because most SLAM algorithms are feature-based techniques and often it is impossible to extract the matched features from blurry underwater images. To get more useful features, image processing techniques can be used to dehaze the images before they are used in a navigation/localization algorithm. There are many well-developed methods for image restoration, but the degree of enhancement and the resource cost of the methods are different. In this paper, we propose a new visual SLAM, specifically-designed for the underwater environment, using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to enhance the quality of underwater images with underwater image quality evaluation metrics. This procedure increases the efficiency of SLAM and gets a better navigation and localization accuracy. We evaluate the proposed GANs-SLAM combination by using different images with various levels of turbidity in the water. Experiments were conducted and the data was extracted from the Carnegie Lake in Princeton, and the Raritan river both in New Jersey, USA.