A Binocular Vision System for Underwater Target Detection

For the underwater target detecting task, a binocular vision system specialized to the underwater optical environment is proposed. The hardware platform is comprised of a image acquising unit, a image processing unit and a upper computer. Accordingly, the loaded software system is operated for the camera calibration, image preprocessing, feature point extraction, stereo matching and the three-dimensional restoration. The improved Harris operator is introduced for the three-dimensional reconstruction, considering the high scattering and strong attenuation by the underwater optical environment. The experiment results prove that the improved Harris operator is better adapt to the complex underwater optical environment and the whole system has the ability to obtain the three-dimensional coordinate of the underwater target more efficient and accurate.