Spectral registration of noisy sonar data for underwater 3D mapping

3D mapping is very challenging in the underwater domain, especially due to the lack of high resolution, low noise sensors. A new spectral registration method is presented that can determine the spatial 6 DOF transformation between pairs of very noisy 3D scans with only partial overlap. The approach is hence suited to cope with sonar as the predominant underwater sensor. The spectral registration method is based on Phase Only Matched Filtering (POMF) on non-trivially resampled spectra of the 3D data.