Committee: 

Dr. Bennett, Advisor

Dr. J. Michaels, Chair

Dr. Tuell

A Shift-variant Restoration Technique Leveraging High-resolution Interface Modeling in Lidar-based Seafloor Imaging

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to develop a restoration technique for lidar-based seafloor imaging that compensates for irregular air-water interfaces. Irregular interfaces, which contain arbitrary low- and high-frequency content, steer and disperse lidar-transmitted laser pulses in ways flat (regular) interfaces do not. Uncompensated steering and dispersion can degrade reflectance-image quality by introducing seafloor-coordinate and reflectance-estimation errors. Current bathymetric lidars do not compensate for these errors when producing seafloor reflectance images, resulting in images susceptible to interface-induced artifacts. The proposed restoration technique would compensate for steering and dispersion introduced by irregular interfaces at the waveform level for each transmitted pulse, thereby improving the accuracy of each seafloor coordinate and reflectance estimate. Then, the reflectance images produced from these seafloor coordinates and reflectance estimates will contain fewer interface-induced artifacts, resulting in higher quality seafloor images.