Underwater 3D scanning using Kinect v2 time of flight camera

This paper presents preliminary results of using commercial time of flight depth camera for 3D scanning of underwater objects. Generating accurate and detailed 3D models of objects in underwater environment is a challenging task. This work presents experimental results of using Microsoft Kinect" v2 depth camera for dense depth data acquisition underwater that gives reasonable 3D scanned data but with smaller scanning range. Motivations for this research are the user friendliness and low-cost of the device as compared to multi view stereo cameras or marine-hardened laser scanning solutions and equipment. Preliminary results of underwater point cloud generation and volumetric reconstruction are also presented. The novelty of this work is the utilization of the Kinect depth camera for real-time 3D mesh reconstruction and the main objective is to develop an economical and compact solution for underwater 3D scanning. © 2017 SPIE.