Hyperspectral 3D Mapping of Underwater Environments.

Hyperspectral imaging has been increasingly used for underwater survey applications over the past years. As many hyperspectral cameras work as push-broom scanners, their use is usually limited to the creation of photo-mosaics based on a flat surface approximation and by interpolating the camera pose from dead-reckoning navigation. Yet, because of drift in the navigation and the mostly wrong flat surface assumption, the quality of the obtained photomosaics is often too low to support adequate analysis. In this paper we present an initial method for creating hyperspectral 3D reconstructions of underwater environments. By fusing the data gathered by a classical RGB camera, an inertial navigation system and a hyperspectral push- broom camera, we show that the proposed method creates highly accurate 3D reconstructions with hyperspectral textures. We propose to combine techniques from simultaneous localization and mapping, structure-from-motion and 3D reconstruction and advantageously use them to create 3D models with hyperspectral texture, allowing us to overcome the flat surface assumption and the classical limitation of dead-reckoning navigation.