Simultaneous 3D Reconstruction for Water Surface and Underwater Scene

Yiming Qian, Yinqiang Zheng, Minglun Gong, Yee-Hong Yang; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 754-770

This paper presents the first approach for simultaneously recovering the 3D shape of both the wavy water surface and the moving underwater scene. A portable camera array system is constructed, which captures the scene from multiple viewpoints above the water. The correspondences across these cameras are estimated using an optical flow method and are used to infer the shape of the water surface and the underwater scene. We assume that there is only one refraction occurring at the water interface. Under this assumption, two estimates of the water surface normals should agree: one from Snell's law of light refraction and another from local surface structure. The experimental results using both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented approach.