Refractive COLMAP: Refractive Structure-from-Motion Revisited
Mengkun She Felix Seegräber David Nakath Kevin Köser
In this paper, we present a complete refractive Structure-from-Motion (RSfM)
framework for underwater 3D reconstruction using refractive camera setups (for
both, flat- and dome-port underwater housings). Despite notable achievements in
refractive multi-view geometry over the past decade, a robust, complete and
publicly available solution for such tasks is not available at present, and
often practical applications have to resort to approximating refraction effects
by the intrinsic (distortion) parameters of a pinhole camera model. To fill
this gap, we have integrated refraction considerations throughout the entire
SfM process within the state-of-the-art, open-source SfM framework COLMAP.
Numerical simulations and reconstruction results on synthetically generated but
photo-realistic images with ground truth validate that enabling refraction does
not compromise accuracy or robustness as compared to in-air reconstructions.
Finally, we demonstrate the capability of our approach for large-scale
refractive scenarios using a dataset consisting of nearly 6000 images. The
implementation is released as open-source at:
https://cau-git.rz.uni-kiel.de/inf-ag-koeser/colmap_underwater.