Underwater polarization imaging for visibility enhancement of moving targets in turbid environments

Abstract

Polarization imaging techniques have more prominent advantages for imaging in strongly scattered media. Previous de-scattering methods of polarization imaging usually require the priori information of the background region, and rarely consider the effect of non-uniformity of the optical field on image recovery, which not only reduces the processing speed of imaging but also introduces errors in image recovery, especially for moving targets in complex scattering environments. In this paper, we propose a turbid underwater moving image recovery method based on the global estimation of the intensity and the degree of polarization (DOP) of the backscattered light, combined with polarization-relation histogram processing techniques. The full spatial distribution of the intensity and the DOP of the backscattered light are obtained by using frequency domain analysis and filtering. Besides, a threshold factor is set in the frequency domain low-pass filter, which is used to adjust the execution region of the filter, which effectively reduces the error in image recovery caused by estimating the DOP of the backscattered light as a constant in traditional methods with non-uniform illumination. Meanwhile, our method requires no human-computer interaction, which effectively solves the drawbacks that the moving target is difficult to be recovered by traditional methods. Experimental studies were conducted on static and moving targets under turbid water, and satisfactory image recovery quality is achieved.