Research on underwater depth estimation using machine learning

Abstract

In recent years, underwater drones have been developed and introduced for investigating underwater. It is indispensable to measure the distance between the robot and the obstacle in correctly in order to carry out the investigation or operation efficiently and safely by an unmanned underwater robot. In this paper, in order to automatically achieve depth estimation from the images taken by an underwater drone equipped with a monocular camera, a machine learning based algorithm which enables underwater depth estimation by applying the previous work with a depth estimation model for the ground condition is proposed. In addition, in order to confirm the performance of the proposed method, quantitative evaluation to the generated underwater depth map is performed. As a result, we success to apply the ground depth estimation model to the underwater image and obtain a highly accurate underwater depth map. Furthermore, by using the distance information from an equipped sonar, the depth of the target object can be corrected with high accuracy.