Image-based underwater 3D reconstruction for Cultural Heritage: from image collection to 3D. Critical steps and considerations
It tackles the difficulty of protecting and monitoring submerged cultural heritage, which is crucial for preservation and public access, but the approach is incremental as it applies existing methods to this specific domain.
The paper addresses the challenge of documenting underwater cultural heritage sites by outlining a process for creating detailed 3D models using photogrammetric techniques, including data acquisition, color restoration, and Structure from Motion, to enable digital preservation and VR dissemination.
Underwater Cultural Heritage (CH) sites are widely spread; from ruins in coastlines up to shipwrecks in deep. The documentation and preservation of this heritage is an obligation of the mankind, dictated also by the international treaties like the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Her-itage which fosters the use of "non-destructive techniques and survey meth-ods in preference over the recovery of objects". However, submerged CH lacks in protection and monitoring in regards to the land CH and nowadays recording and documenting, for digital preservation as well as dissemination through VR to wide public, is of most importance. At the same time, it is most difficult to document it, due to inherent restrictions posed by the environ-ment. In order to create high detailed textured 3D models, optical sensors and photogrammetric techniques seems to be the best solution. This chapter dis-cusses critical aspects of all phases of image based underwater 3D reconstruc-tion process, from data acquisition and data preparation using colour restora-tion and colour enhancement algorithms to Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) techniques to produce an accurate, precise and complete 3D model for a number of applications.