Opti-acoustic stereo imaging: on system calibration and 3-D target reconstruction

Utilization of an acoustic camera for range measurements is a key advantage for 3-D shape recovery of underwater targets by opti-acoustic stereo imaging, where the associated epipolar geometry of optical and acoustic image correspondences can be described in terms of conic sections. In this paper, we propose methods for system calibration and 3-D scene reconstruction by maximum likelihood estimation from noisy image measurements. The recursive 3-D reconstruction method utilized as initial condition a closed-form solution that integrates the advantages of two other closed-form solutions, referred to as the range and azimuth solutions. Synthetic data tests are given to provide insight into the merits of the new target imaging and 3-D reconstruction paradigm, while experiments with real data confirm the findings based on computer simulations, and demonstrate the merits of this novel 3-D reconstruction paradigm.