Unified Underwater Structure-from-Motion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified method for accurate 3D shape reconstruction of underwater targets using a single camera, accounting for various camera and interface motions, and demonstrates its effectiveness with real data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive reconstruction framework for different underwater scenarios, including interface and camera movements, and extends to non-planar interfaces using wave information.

Findings

Outperforms existing underwater reconstruction methods

Successfully reconstructs 3D shapes with real underwater data

Handles both static and dynamic refractive interfaces

Abstract

This paper shows that accurate underwater 3D shape reconstruction is possible using a single camera, observing a target through a refractive interface. We provide unified reconstruction techniques for a variety of scenarios such as single static camera and moving refractive interface, single moving camera and static refractive interface, and single moving camera and moving refractive interface. In our basic setup, we assume that the refractive interface is planar, and simultaneously estimate the unknown transformations of the planar interface and the camera, and the unknown target shape using bundle adjustment. We also extend it to relax the planarity assumption, which enables us to use waves of the refractive interface for the reconstruction task. Experiments with real data show the superiority of our method to existing methods.