Low cost 3D underwater surface reconstruction technique by image processing

A non-intrusive technique to reconstruct underwater surfaces is described in this work. As main advantages, it just requires to work some low cost material and subroutines of the well known Matlab© software. The method is based on a point pattern matching technique and on the processing of some images of projected lines on the surface to be reconstructed. The methodology has been validated by reconstructing the shape and dimensions of a seashell and an inverted spoon, and it is shown to be valid for scanning 3D surfaces with an accuracy error proportional to the projected line thickness and the number of them. After the validation test, the error did not exceed 1 mm, which gives a global average error of 2.4% in relative terms. The developed software also gives to the user the possibility of getting quantitative data from the 3D surface such as the maximum and minimum values of the reconstructed surface, and the volume of different regions of the surface.