Estimating the precision of under-water video-mosaics

Under-water video-mosaics are an important tool e.g. for inspection of man-made infrastructure. Cameras may drift in rotation and distance to the surface while the mosaic will often be very much larger than a single frame resulting in long chains of planar homographies. This contribution addresses the problems arising from dead-reckoning drift in such chains. Local patches are rectified using homography decomposition. Experiments with a portal allowing underwater image sequences with mechanical groundtruth are performed. Thus the deviation of the mosaic from a true orthographic map may be estimated.