Design, Implementation and Evaluation of an External Pose-Tracking System for Underwater Cameras

PFG - Journal of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Science manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Abstract In order to advance underwater computer vision 3 mm and 0.3 . Finally, the usability of the system for and robotics from lab environments and clear water underwater applications is demonstrated. In particular, truth HTC Vive determining the camera pose is essential for many underwater robotic or photogrammetric applications and known ground truth is mandatory to evaluate the performance 1 Introduction of e.g., simultaneous localization and mapping approaches in such extreme environments. This paper Pose estimation is a mandatory prerequisite in multiple presents the conception, calibration and implementation disciplines, where each case demands the selection of a of an external reference system for determining suitable tracking method. GPS) for example, the underwater camera pose in real-time. The approach, is suitable for determining the position of vehicles based on an HTC Vive tracking system in air, calculates that have a direct line of sight to multiple satellites, the underwater camera pose by fusing the poses of two but this method cannot be used underwater due to the controllers tracked above the water surface of a tank. Instead, acoustic methods or It is shown that the mean deviation of this approach optical markers can be used here (Kinsey et al. 2006). Figure 1 Application in a deep sea AUV scenario: from left to right: the whole system with the external reference system, underwater camera, and artificial lights; an overview of the scene, without external light sources; and finally a view through the underwater camera. To reduce the already argued in Nakath et al. (2022), underwater validation tracking and transformation errors, two controllers are scenarios severely suffer from the lack of exactly used on the upper end of the camera stick.