Monocular ORB-SLAM application in underwater scenarios

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of monocular ORB-SLAM applied to underwater scenarios. It is investigated as an alternative SLAM method with minimal instu-mentation compared to other approaches that integrate different sensors such as inertial and acoustic sensors. ORB-SLAM creates a 3D map based on image frames and estimates the position of the robot by using a feature-based front-end and a graph-based back-end. The performance of ORB-SLAM is evaluated through experiments in different settings with varying lighting, visibility and water dynamics. Results show good performance given the right conditions and demonstrate that ORB-SLAM can work well in the underwater environment. Based on our findings the paper outlines possible enhancements which should further improve on the algorithms performance.