Photogrammetry Used for Exhibition Of Naval Shipwreck

A joint venture between software company NVIDIA and researchers at Curtin University in Western Australia has seen the recreation of the wreck of a shipwreck using photogrammetry and 3D printing technology. The exhibition, at the WA Maritime Museum, was developed to show an wartime battle that occurred on November 19, 1941. Namely, that day Australia’s HMAS Sydney (II) and Germany’s HSK Kormoran exchanged fire for over an hour with over 700 resultant deaths. Moreover, both ships sank over 8,000 feet where they lay undiscovered for decades. Now, the shipwrecks are on the Australia National Heritage List, and thanks to 3D models, museum-goers can view the shipwrecks from the comfort of the museum.

This project has been created as part of the Curtin HIVE, a Curtin University group which works on simulation and visualization within the country. Andrew Woods, an associate professor at Curtin University and an expert in stereoscopic 3D visualization, built an underwater rig with more than a dozen video and still cameras to capture details of the wrecks in 2015. These scans then were converted into 3D models.

The shipwreck project was made using photogrammetry, a technology which involves the interpretation of photographic images, for example for the purpose of 3D printing. However, the technology is not necessarily easy to use. “It’s highly computationally intensive — when you double the number of images, you quadruple the compute requirements,” said Woods, who manages the Curtin HIVE. Ash Doshi, a computer vision specialist and senior research officer at Curtin, then developed and ran software on NVIDIA GPUs to stitch the half-million pictures and 300 hours of video they took into virtual and printed 3D models.