Position control for underwater vehicle using image processing

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method of position control for an underwater vehicle using a monocular camera. The proposed method does not require an expensive inertial measurement unit (IMU) and uses template matching to track the underwater target and calculate the amount of vehicle movement. The vehicle is then controlled on the basis of the amount of movement. In this paper, we compare the typical similarity calculation methods of template matching, sum of squared differences (SSD), normalized cross-correlation (NCC), and zero-mean normalized cross-correlation (ZNCC), and investigate which has the greatest accuracy underwater. We also compare proportional (P) control and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control as vehicle control methods. The results showed that ZNCC was the most accurate in detecting the target and that PID control was about 30% more accurate than P control.