Three Dimensional Ship Modeling for Submarine Combat Systems

The rapid identification of ships from periscope and other imagery is a capability important to a variety of submarine missions, including sea control, anti-surface warfare, battle group support, covert operations landings, and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) operations. When spotting a new vessel, the imagery taken from submarines can be useful to construct three-dimensional (3D) computer-aided design (CAD) models of ships that can be used for identification in future sightings, for computer-generated simulations, and for capabilities assessment. Currently the task of ship recognition from images requires substantial human involvement, and model building is labor intensive. This project aims to develop a prototype Ship Shape system that computes 3D CAD models from submarine periscope imagery of ships, with operator involvement limited to 15-30 minutes per model. Based on our Phase I feasibility demonstrations, this Phase II project leverages current computer vision techniques, including image segmentation, sparse shape reconstruction, dense shape reconstruction, and CAD modeling with limited user interaction. The Ship Shape system will be submitted for evaluation for use on submarines via the Navy APB process.