Real-time reconstruction of underwater environments: From 2D to 3D

This paper presents a real-time 2D image mosaicking tool developed to provide instantaneous feedback on image quality and area coverage during underwater site inspection or documentation surveys. The algorithm implements a feature extraction and matching approach to stitching video frames into a single image. While its main advantage is providing good results for fast documentation in real-time even on low-end computer hardware, it has also some limitations in terms of sensitivity to the camera motion and lower performance in textureless or uniform environments. The final part of the paper addresses those limitations by providing an insight of the concept behind the ongoing development of a real-time direct 3D reconstruction tool for underwater applications.