Leveraging 6DoF Pose Foundation Models For Mapping Marine Sediment Burial

The burial state of anthropogenic objects on the seafloor provides insight into localized sedimentation dynamics and is also critical for assessing ecological risks, potential pollutant transport, and the viability of recovery or mitigation strategies for hazardous materials such as munitions. Accurate burial depth estimation from remote imagery remains difficult due to partial occlusion, poor visibility, and object degradation. This work introduces a computer vision pipeline, called PoseIDON, which combines deep foundation model features with multiview photogrammetry to estimate six degrees of freedom object pose and the orientation of the surrounding seafloor from ROV video. Burial depth is inferred by aligning CAD models of the objects with observed imagery and fitting a local planar approximation of the seafloor. The method is validated using footage of 54 objects, including barrels and munitions, recorded at a historic ocean dumpsite in the San Pedro Basin. The model achieves a mean burial depth error of approximately 10 centimeters and resolves spatial burial patterns that reflect underlying sediment transport processes. This approach enables scalable, non-invasive mapping of seafloor burial and supports environmental assessment at contaminated sites.

Pose Estimation of Buried Deep-Sea Objects using 3D Vision Deep Learning Models

We present an approach for pose and burial fraction estimation of debris field barrels found on the seabed in the Southern California San Pedro Basin. Our computational workflow leverages recent advances in foundation models for segmentation and a vision transformer-based approach to estimate the point cloud which defines the geometry of the barrel. We propose BarrelNet for estimating the 6-DOF pose and radius of buried barrels from the barrel point clouds as input. We train BarrelNet using synthetically generated barrel point clouds, and qualitatively demonstrate the potential of our approach using remotely operated vehicle (ROV) video footage of barrels found at a historic dump site. We compare our method to a traditional least squares fitting approach and show significant improvement according to our defined benchmarks.