Calibration of consumer cameras in a multimedia environment

Underwater photogrammetry provides an efficient nondestructive means for measurement in environments that offers limited accessibility. With the growing use of consumer non-metric cameras, underwater photography becomes easier and widespread thus leading to a variety of applications that can benefit from it. Utilizing consumer cameras for underwater photogrammetry poses, nonetheless, some nontrivial modeling problems due to the effect the different media has on the light traveling through. Furthermore, special equipment that protects the cameras from water extends the imaging system into one consisting of the camera and the protecting housing. To realize the potential of photogrammetry in an underwater environment the behavior of this new optical system has to be analyzed, particularly in relation to the calibration of this consumer based imaging system. This paper studies the effect that multi-media environment posses on the photogrammetric process and proposes a model for describing the geometric distortions and for estimating the additional parameters involved. Results show that the new model improves that accuracy achieved by current models.