AquaCal

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Refractive multi-camera calibration for underwater arrays. AquaCal calibrates cameras in air viewing through a flat water surface, using Snell's law to achieve accurate 3D reconstruction in refractive environments.

Features

Snell's law refractive projection — Accurate ray-tracing through air-water interfaces
Multi-camera pose graph — BFS-based extrinsic initialization for camera arrays
Joint bundle adjustment — Simultaneous optimization of extrinsics, interface distances, and board poses
Sparse Jacobian optimization — Scalable to 10+ cameras with column grouping
ChArUco board detection — Robust corner detection for calibration targets
Validation diagnostics — Holdout reprojection, 3D triangulation checks, and per-camera error breakdowns
Active re-calibration (beta) — refine_calibration() updates an existing calibration from point correspondences collected in the field; not yet fully tested

Installation

pip install aquacal

Quick Start

Install AquaCal:
```
pip install aquacal
```

Generate a configuration file from your calibration videos:

aquacal init --intrinsic-dir videos/intrinsic/ --extrinsic-dir videos/extrinsic/

Run calibration:
```
aquacal calibrate config.yaml
```

Results are saved to output/calibration.json with camera intrinsics, extrinsics, interface distances, and diagnostics.

Documentation

Full documentation is available at aquacal.readthedocs.io:

Overview — What is refractive calibration and when do you need it?
User Guide — Theory, methodology, and coordinate conventions
API Reference — Detailed module and function documentation
Tutorials — Interactive Jupyter notebook examples
Configuration Reference — YAML config schema and options

Citation

If you use AquaCal in your research, please cite:

@software{aquacal,
  title = {AquaCal: Refractive Multi-Camera Calibration},
  author = {Lancaster, Tucker},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/McGrathLab/AquaCal},
  version = {1.7.0},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.18644658}
}

See CITATION.cff for full citation metadata.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

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Publisher: publish.yml on McGrathLab/AquaCal

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