Design, Implementation and Evaluation of an External Pose-Tracking System for Underwater Cameras

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time external pose-tracking system for underwater cameras using an HTC Vive system, enabling accurate camera localization in challenging underwater environments for robotics and vision tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel calibration and implementation of an external tracking system that accurately determines underwater camera pose in real-time, suitable for extreme environments.

Findings

Mean deviation less than 3 mm and 0.3 degrees compared to optical marker reference.

System successfully demonstrated for underwater applications.

Enables realistic benchmarks and datasets for underwater vision research.

Abstract

In order to advance underwater computer vision and robotics from lab environments and clear water scenarios to the deep dark ocean or murky coastal waters, representative benchmarks and realistic datasets with ground truth information are required. In particular, determining the camera pose is essential for many underwater robotic or photogrammetric applications and known ground truth is mandatory to evaluate the performance of e.g., simultaneous localization and mapping approaches in such extreme environments. This paper presents the conception, calibration and implementation of an external reference system for determining the underwater camera pose in real-time. The approach, based on an HTC Vive tracking system in air, calculates the underwater camera pose by fusing the poses of two controllers tracked above the water surface of a tank. It is shown that the mean deviation of this approach to an optical marker based reference in air is less than 3 mm and 0.3 deg. Finally, the usability of the system for underwater applications is demonstrated.