Underwater measurement of abalone shell’s size based on stereo vision

In order to cultivate superior varieties of abalone, it is necessary to accurately measure the useful trait data of them. This paper presents a novel underwater binocular system for measuring the size of abalone. The measurement process can be divided into two main stages. In the first stage, underwater images are corrected using our proposed algorithm to eliminate the impact of refraction. In the second stage, the corrected images are utilized for the 3D reconstruction of the abalone shell. The length and width can be calculated by analyzing the contour of the shell. To validate the effectiveness of our method, a set of abalone shell samples are measured with the binocular system. The average measurement errors for the length and the width are 2.02% and 2.54%, respectively. •Developed a novel non-contact binocular system for underwater abalone measurement.•Proposed an correction algorithm to eliminate the impact of refraction on images.•Average measurement errors of the length and width of abalone samples are satisfied.