Mapping the Catacombs: An Underwater Cave Segment of the Devil's Eye System

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chatzispyrou, Michalis, Horgan, Luke, Hwang, Hyunkil, Sathishchandra, Harish, Roznere, Monika, Li, Alberto Quattrini, Mordohai, Philippos, Rekleitis, Ioannis
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Chatzispyrou, Michalis
Horgan, Luke
Hwang, Hyunkil
Sathishchandra, Harish
Roznere, Monika
Li, Alberto Quattrini
Mordohai, Philippos
Rekleitis, Ioannis
author_facet Chatzispyrou, Michalis
Horgan, Luke
Hwang, Hyunkil
Sathishchandra, Harish
Roznere, Monika
Li, Alberto Quattrini
Mordohai, Philippos
Rekleitis, Ioannis
contents This paper presents a framework for mapping underwater caves. Underwater caves are crucial for fresh water resource management, underwater archaeology, and hydrogeology. Mapping the cave's outline and dimensions, as well as creating photorealistic 3D maps, is critical for enabling a better understanding of this underwater domain. In this paper, we present the mapping of an underwater cave segment (the catacombs) of the Devil's Eye cave system at Ginnie Springs, FL. We utilized a set of inexpensive action cameras in conjunction with a dive computer to estimate the trajectories of the cameras together with a sparse point cloud. The resulting reconstructions are utilized to produce a one-dimensional retract of the cave passages in the form of the average trajectory together with the boundaries (top, bottom, left, and right). The use of the dive computer enables the observability of the z-dimension in addition to the roll and pitch in a visual/inertial framework (SVIn2). In addition, the keyframes generated by SVIn2 together with the estimated camera poses for select areas are used as input to a global optimization (bundle adjustment) framework -- COLMAP -- in order to produce a dense reconstruction of those areas. The same cave segment is manually surveyed using the MNemo V2 instrument, providing an additional set of measurements validating the proposed approach. It is worth noting that with the use of action cameras, the primary components of a cave map can be constructed. Furthermore, with the utilization of a global optimization framework guided by the results of VI-SLAM package SVIn2, photorealistic dense 3D representations of selected areas can be reconstructed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06397
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mapping the Catacombs: An Underwater Cave Segment of the Devil's Eye System
Chatzispyrou, Michalis
Horgan, Luke
Hwang, Hyunkil
Sathishchandra, Harish
Roznere, Monika
Li, Alberto Quattrini
Mordohai, Philippos
Rekleitis, Ioannis
Robotics
This paper presents a framework for mapping underwater caves. Underwater caves are crucial for fresh water resource management, underwater archaeology, and hydrogeology. Mapping the cave's outline and dimensions, as well as creating photorealistic 3D maps, is critical for enabling a better understanding of this underwater domain. In this paper, we present the mapping of an underwater cave segment (the catacombs) of the Devil's Eye cave system at Ginnie Springs, FL. We utilized a set of inexpensive action cameras in conjunction with a dive computer to estimate the trajectories of the cameras together with a sparse point cloud. The resulting reconstructions are utilized to produce a one-dimensional retract of the cave passages in the form of the average trajectory together with the boundaries (top, bottom, left, and right). The use of the dive computer enables the observability of the z-dimension in addition to the roll and pitch in a visual/inertial framework (SVIn2). In addition, the keyframes generated by SVIn2 together with the estimated camera poses for select areas are used as input to a global optimization (bundle adjustment) framework -- COLMAP -- in order to produce a dense reconstruction of those areas. The same cave segment is manually surveyed using the MNemo V2 instrument, providing an additional set of measurements validating the proposed approach. It is worth noting that with the use of action cameras, the primary components of a cave map can be constructed. Furthermore, with the utilization of a global optimization framework guided by the results of VI-SLAM package SVIn2, photorealistic dense 3D representations of selected areas can be reconstructed.
title Mapping the Catacombs: An Underwater Cave Segment of the Devil's Eye System
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06397