Method for stitching forward-looking sonar images while retaining information

A method for stitching forward-looking sonar images while retaining information, comprising:

• acquisition of a forward-looking sonar image sequence, image registration, information extraction, and image blending;
• wherein the image registration specifically comprises:
• estimating relative rotational displacements of the forward-looking sonar image sequence using a phase correlation method, accumulating to obtain a global rotational displacement, and applying the global rotational displacement to images to obtain a preliminary stitched image;
• the information extraction specifically comprises:
• subjecting the forward-looking sonar image sequence to a temporal window method and a spatial window method to obtain local variance statistics and local background variance statistics, combining the local variance statistics and the local background variance statistics based on weights to obtain corrected local variance statistics, and combining the corrected local variance statistics with the global rotational displacement to obtain a global variance map;
• and
• the image blending specifically comprises:
• forming a final stitched result from the preliminary stitched image under an influence of the global variance map.