Procedures and technologies for 3D reconstruction with divers of underwater archaeological sites and marine protected areas

Underwater monitoring and exploration actions are fundamental to preserve natural habitats and submerged cultural heritage, but researchers have to face high costs related to technology and staff to carry out researches in this troublesome environment. As a partial solution to these problems, Citizen Science has been incrementally employed by the scientific community but, to effectively make the most of it, it is mandatory to design two components: a generic-scenario procedure that describes the steps to perform before, during and after the survey and tailored technologies to acquire, gather, process and visualize the environmental data. In this work, a procedure tested in different underwater missions, that is the enhancement of a precedent one, and technologies that, arranged in a pipeline, carry out all the process from data acquisition to output visualization are presented. The procedure and technology were tested in tailored tests aimed to guarantee the validity of the technologies.