Photogrammetric modeling of underwater environments

Underwater photogrammetry provides an efficient nondestructive means for measurement in environments with limited accessibility. With the growing use of consumer cameras, its application is becoming easier, thus benefiting a wide variety of disciplines. However, utilizing cameras for underwater photogrammetry poses some nontrivial modeling problems due to refraction effect and the extension of the imaging system into a unit of both the camera and the protecting housing device. This paper studies the effect that the underwater environment has on the photogrammetric process, and proposes a model for describing the geometric distortions and for estimating the additional parameters involved. The proposed model accounts not only for the multimedia effect, but also for inaccuracies related to the setting of the camera and housing device. The paper shows that only a small number of additional parameters is needed to model both elements and to preserve the collinearity relation. The results show that no unique setup is needed for estimating the additional parameters and that the estimation is insensitive to noise or first approximations. Experiments show that high levels of accuracy can be achieved.