Calibration of optical camera coupled to acoustic multibeam for underwater 3D scene reconstruction

Combination of optical and acoustic sensors to compensate the strengths and weaknesses of each sensor modality is a topic of increasing interest in applications involving autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). In this work, an opti-acoustic system composed by a single camera and a multibeam sonar is proposed, providing a simulation environment to validate its potential use in 3D reconstruction. Since extrinsic calibration is a prerequisite for this kind of feature-level sensor fusion, an effective approach to address the calibration problem between a multibeam and a camera is presented.