UV3D: Underwater Video Stream 3D Reconstruction Based on Efficient Global SFM

Abstract

With the increasing demand for underwater resource exploration, three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction technology is important for searching for lost underwater civilizations, underwater shipwrecks, or seabed structures. However, faced with the limitations of underwater unmanned systems in terms of energy, bandwidth, and transmission delay, 3D reconstruction technology based on video streams as direct data will not work well. We propose a terminal image processing strategy to save data transmission time and cost and to obtain 3D scene information as soon as possible. Firstly, we propose an adaptive threshold key frame extraction algorithm based on clustering, which extracts key frames from the video stream as structure from motion (SFM) image sequences. On this basis, we enhance the underwater images with sufficient and insufficient illumination to improve the image quality and obtain a better visual effect in the 3D reconstruction step. Additionally, we choose global SFM to construct the scene and propose a faster rotation averaging method, the least trimmed square rotation averaging (LTS-RA) method, based on the least trimmed squares (LTS) and L1RA methods. It is proven to reduce 19.97% of the time through experiments. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the dense point cloud saves about 70% of the transmission cost compared to video streaming.