In-the-Wild Single Camera 3D Reconstruction Through Moving Water Surfaces

We present a method for reconstructing the 3D shape of underwater environments from a single, stationary camera placed above the water. We propose a novel differentiable framework, which, to our knowledge, is the first single-camera solution that is capable of simultaneously retrieving the structure of dynamic water surfaces and static underwater scene geometry in the wild. This framework integrates ray casting of Snell’s law at the refractive interface, multi-view triangulation and specially designed loss functions.Our method is calibration-free, and thus it is easy to collect data outdoors in uncontrolled environments. Experimental results show that our method is able to realize robust and quality reconstructions on a variety of scenes, both in a laboratory environment and in the wild, and even in a salt water environment. We believe the method is promising for applications in surveying and environmental monitoring.