Low cost stereo system for imaging and 3D reconstruction of underwater organisms

This paper presents an autonomous low cost device for underwater stereo imaging and 3D reconstruction of marine organisms (benthos, fishes, macro and mega-zooplankton) and seabed with a high accuracy. The system is designed for deployments onboard autonomous, fixed and towed platforms. Internal hardware consists of two Raspberry Pi mini-PCs and two Raspberry camera modules. The operational pipeline is managed through a client/server paradigm. The 3D imaging acquisition system is fully programmable in acquisition scheduling and capture settings. When tested on sets of images containing objects of known size, the system returned an accuracy of metric measurements of the order of 2%. The system is intended as a prototype, and a collaboration with companies has been established in order to realize a complete commercial product.