<p>This paper presents Diver Interest via Pointing in Three Dimensions (DIP-3D), a method to indicate an object of interest from a diver to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) by pointing that includes three-dimensional distance information to discriminate between multiple objects in the AUV’s field of view. Traditional dense stereo vision for distance estimation underwater is challenging because of the relative lack of saliency of scene features and degraded lighting conditions. Yet in many applications, including distance information is necessary for robotic perception of diver pointing when multiple objects appear within the robot’s image view. We subvert the challenges of underwater distance estimation by using sparse reconstruction of specific keypoints in both the left and right images from the robot’s stereo camera to perform pose estimation. Triangulated pose keypoints, along with any object detection method, enable DIP-3D to infer the location of an object of interest when multiple objects are in the AUV’s field of view. By allowing the scuba diver to point at an arbitrary object of interest and enabling the AUV to autonomously decide which object the diver is pointing to, this method permits more natural interaction between AUVs and humans in underwater-human robot collaborative tasks.</p>