Adjustment and Calibration of Dome Port Camera Systems for Underwater Vision

Abstract

Dome ports act as spherical windows in underwater housings through which a camera can observe objects in the water. As compared to flat glass interfaces, they do not limit the field of view, and they do not cause refraction of light observed by a pinhole camera positioned exactly in the center of the dome. Mechanically adjusting a real lens to this position is a challenging task, in particular for those integrated in deep sea housings. In this contribution a mechanical adjustment procedure based on straight line observations above and below water is proposed that allows for accurate alignments. Additionally, we show a chessboard-based method employing an underwater/above-water image pair to estimate potentially remaining offsets from the dome center to allow refraction correction in photogrammetric applications. Besides providing intuition about the severity of refraction in certain settings, we demonstrate the methods on real data for acrylic and glass domes in the water.