Adjustment of Sonar and Laser Acquisition Data for Building the 3D Reference Model of a Canal Tunnel

In this paper, we focus on the construction of a full 3D model of a canal tunnel by combining terrestrial laser (for its above-water part) and sonar (for its underwater part) scans collected from static acquisitions. The modeling of such a structure is challenging because the sonar device is used in a narrow environment that induces many artifacts. Moreover, the location and the orientation of the sonar device are unknown. In our approach, sonar data are first simultaneously denoised and meshed. Then, above- and under-water point clouds are co-registered to generate directly the full 3D model of the canal tunnel. Faced with the lack of overlap between both models, we introduce a robust algorithm that relies on geometrical entities and partially-immersed targets, which are visible in both the laser and sonar point clouds. A full 3D model, visually promising, of the entrance of a canal tunnel is obtained. The analysis of the method raises several improvement directions that will help with obtaining more accurate models, in a more automated way, in the limits of the involved technology.