Refractive Structure-from-Motion on Underwater Images

Abstract

In underwater environments, cameras need to be confined in an underwater housing, viewing the scene through a piece of glass. In case of flat port underwater housings, light rays entering the camera housing are refracted twice, due to different medium densities of water, glass, and air. This causes the usually linear rays of light to bend and the commonly used pinhole camera model to be invalid. When using the pinhole camera model without explicitly modeling refraction in Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods, a systematic model error occurs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a system for computing camera path and 3D points with explicit incorporation of refraction using new methods for pose estimation. Additionally, a new error function is introduced for non-linear optimization, especially bundle adjustment. The proposed method allows to increase reconstruction accuracy and is evaluated in a set of experiments, where the proposed method's performance is compared to SfM with the perspective camera model.