Case Study: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution achieves accurate, high-resolution underwater photomosaics with MathWorks MATLAB and Toolboxes

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Improves Underwater Imaging

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) needed to create accurate large-scale photomosaics in low-light, distortion-prone underwater environments. To overcome irregular lighting, shifting shadows, lens distortion, and difficult feature matching, WHOI used MathWorks tools—primarily MATLAB with Image Processing Toolbox and Optimization Toolbox—to develop specialized underwater photomosaicking methods.

Using MathWorks software, WHOI preprocessed 16‑bit images, corrected radial distortion, built multiresolution pyramids, extracted features via FFTs, and performed pairwise and global registration with sparse matrices and Levenberg–Marquardt optimization. The result was accurate mosaics (including a 350‑m² Roman shipwreck where researchers could count individual amphoras), compact high‑performance MATLAB code (orders of magnitude smaller than equivalent C/C++), and shareable tools adopted by other groups such as the University of Singapore.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Hanumant Singh

Associate Scientist