An underwater stereo vision system: From design to deployment and dataset acquisition

This paper describes the hardware setup of a stereovision system for underwater 3D object detection and a camera calibration method that does not require complex underwater procedures. The vision system has been developed within the MARIS Italian national project for underwater cooperative intervention tasks. The hardware architecture is based upon state of the art technologies. The software modules of the system are based on the ROS middleware. A dataset of underwater stereo images of cylindrical pipes has been collected and is made publicly available.