Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Underwater Objects from Side-scan Sonar Images

This paper describes a method to reconstruct the three-dimensional aspects of underwater objects using side-scan sonar images. The sonar images are segmented into three kinds of regions: echo, shadow and background. A two-dimensional intensity map is estimated from the echoes and a two-dimensional depth map is computed from the shadow information. With the transformation model, the final reconstruction merges these two maps to generate three-dimensional point cloud images of underwater objects.