Abstract
This work aims to analyze natural underwater scenes and it focuses on mapping underwater environment in 3D. Today, many methods exist to solve this problem. The originality of this work lies in the fusion of two maps obtained from sensors of different resolutions. Initially, an autonomous vehicle (or boat) analyzes the seabed with multibeam sonar and creates a first global map of the area. This map is then divided into small cells representing a mosaic of the seabed. A second analysis is then performed on some particular cells using a second sensor with a higher resolution. This will provide a detailed map of the 3D cell. An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) or a diver with a stereoscopic vision system will make this acquisition. This project is divided into two parts; the first one focuses on the 3D reconstruction of underwater scenes in constrained environment using a stereoscopic pair. The second part investigates the multimodal aspect. In our study, we want to use this method to obtain accurate reconstructions of archaeological objects (statues, amphorae, etc.) detected on the globalmap. The first part of the work relates the 3D reconstruction of the underwater scene. Even if today the vision community has led to a better understanding of this type of images, the study of natural underwater scenes still poses many problems. We have taken into account the underwater noise during the creation of the 3D video model and during the calibration of cameras. A study of the noise robustness was performed on two methods of detection and matching of features points. This resulted into obtaining accurate and robust feature points for the 3D model. Epipolar geometry allowed us to project these points in 3D. The texture was added to the surfaces obtained by Delaunay triangulation. The second part consists of fusing the 3D model obtained previously with the acoustic map. To align the two 3D models (video and acoustic model), we use a first approximated registration by selecting manually few points on each cloud. To increase the accuracy of this registration, we use an algorithm ICP (Iterative Closest Point). In this work we created a 3D underwater multimodal map performed using 3D video model and an acoustic global map.