This paper presents improved techniques and applications in mosaicing of underwater video images. The applications are of use to many marine scientists. High resolution seabed maps are created. The improvements in the processing relate to the removal of interframe variability and lighting, speed up of the mosaicing process and improved accuracy in the estimation of the transformation parameters. Results are presented for real data acquired under a variety of circumstances and scenes.

Two heuristic methods are presented for accelerating convergence of a force-directed placement problem. The first stabilizes the derivative of the repulsion force. The second uses information on device movement and instability characteristics to make a predictive extrapolation. Convergence is accelerated by replacing iterations with the faster heuristic iterations. A standard implementation from the literature is made three to four times faster by using these techniques.