Underwater feature extraction and pillar mapping

A mechanicaly scanned imaging sonar, MSIS, pro-duces a 2D image of the range and bearing of return intensities.The pattern produced in this image depends on the envior-mental feature that caused it. These features are very usefulfor underwater navigation but the inverse mapping of sonarimage pattern to environmental feature can be ambiguous. Weinvestigate problems associated with using MSIS for navigation.In particular we show that support vector machines can be usedto classify the existance and types of feature in a sonar image.We develop a sonar processing pipleline that can be used fornavigation. This is tested on two sonar datasets collected fromROV’s. 1The work presented in this papers has been funded by the Swedish Defense Material Administration (FMV) through the Cluster for Underwater Technology (CUTe) at KTH.QC 20160115FMV Underwater Pilot Projec