An Optical Digital Twin for Underwater Photogrammetry

Abstract

Most parts of the Earth’s surface are situated in the deep ocean. To explore this visually rather adversarial environment with cameras, they have to be protected by pressure housings. These housings, in turn, need interfaces to the world, enduring extreme pressures within the water column. Commonly, a flat window or a half-sphere of glass, called flat-port or dome-port, respectively is used to implement such kind of interface. Hence, multi-media interfaces, between water, glass and air are introduced, entailing refraction effects in the images taken through them. To obtain unbiased 3D measurements and to yield a geometrically faithful reconstruction of the scene, it is mandatory to deal with the effects in a proper manner. Hence, we propose an optical digital twin of an underwater environment, which has been geometrically verified to resemble a real water lab tank that features the two most common optical interfaces. It can be used to develop, evaluate, train, test and tune refractive algorithms. Alongside this paper, we publish the model for further extension, jointly with code to dynamically generate samples from the dataset. Finally, we also publish a pre-rendered dataset ready for use at https://git.geomar.de/david-nakath/geodt.