Water-MBSL: Underwater Movable Binocular Structured Light-Based High-Precision Dense Reconstruction Framework

Structured light systems are widely used in underwater dense reconstruction due to their excellent accuracy. However, the current related methods mainly focus on fixed positions. The reconstruction performance in motion is insufficient. Therefore, we propose an underwater movable binocular structured light (MBSL) based high-precision dense reconstruction framework, named WaterMBSL, to realize the robot reconstruction while moving. Specifically, an onboard binocular structured light system based on mirror-galvanometer is developed first. Then, a simplified underwater point cloud acquisition algorithm is presented to quickly obtain 3-D information of the scene. Besides, a new underwater motion compensation algorithm combining inertial measurement unit and uniform velocity model is proposed. Moreover, the generalized-ICP point cloud registration algorithm is introduced to achieve accurate motion estimation. Finally, an underwater movable reconstruction platform is developed by integrating the self-designed structured light system with the underwater robot BlueROV for validating the performance of our proposed Water-MBSL. Experimental results show that satisfactory motion reconstruction performance can be obtained.