3D laser gated viewing from a moving submarine platform

Abstract

Range-gated active imaging is a prominent technique for night vision, remote sensing or vision through obstacles (fog, smoke, camouflage netting…). Furthermore, range-gated imaging not only informs on the scene reflectance but also on the range for each pixel. In this paper, we discuss 3D imaging methods for underwater imaging applications. In this situation, it is particularly difficult to stabilize the imaging platform and these 3D reconstruction algorithms suffer from the motion between the different images in the recorded sequence. To overcome this drawback, we investigated a new method based on a combination between image registration by homography and 3D scene reconstruction through tomography or two-image technique. After stabilisation, the 3D reconstruction is achieved by using the two upper-mentioned techniques. In the different experimental examples given in this paper, a centimetric resolution could be achieved.