Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Technical Update - Mapping and Image Processing

Departure is nearly upon us! We have been doing a great deal of work the last few weeks getting everything ready. Erik and I had an opportunity recently to drive the ROV in the pool and perform a full mapping run. We positioned the ROV in strategic locations throughout the pool and captured a series of sonar scans. These were fed through Billy's mapping program to generate a map of the pool.

It was an excellent opportunity for us to practice the teamwork and processes necessary for a full deployment, including setup, un-boxing, deployment, scanning, assembly, and take-down. After the session I feel a great deal more comfortable with the equipment and software we will be using in Malta.
In addition, I have been doing further research on the topic of image processing. In particular, I need to smooth the back-scatter out of the cistern photos, then sharpen the images and equalize their appearance for texturing. Smoothing will be done using a median filter, as shown below. Notice how an increasing filter size greatly reduces the noise in the picture. However, it also blurs the subject of the image. This effect may be reversed using a laplacian mask to re-sharpen the transitions of the image. Once this process is complete, I hope to have a clear, sharp picture ready for texturing. The final step will be to equalize the gamma across all images so they blend smoothly together on the final mesh.

Tim is also doing some image processing work with his 3D imaging project. I am hoping that the research I have done for texture smoothing will also be able to help him in generating his bump and disparity maps.

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