Visibility enhancement of underwater images based on polarization common-mode rejection of a highly polarized target signal

Abstract

Underwater active polarization imaging is promising due to its effect of significantly descattering. Polarization-difference is commonly used to filter out backscattered noise. However, the polarization common-mode rejection of target signal has rarely been utilized. In this paper, via taking full advantage of this feature of Stokes vectors S2 which ably avoids interference from target light, the spatial variation of the degree of polarization of backscattered light is accurately estimated, and the whole scene intensity distribution of background is reconstructed by Gaussian surface fitting based on least square. Meanwhile, the underwater image quality measure is applied as optimization feedback, through iterative computations, not only sufficiently suppresses backscattered noise but also better highlights the details of the target. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for highly polarized target in strongly scattering water.

Hyperspectral Channel-Modulated Static Birefringent Fourier Transform Imaging Spectropolarimeter with Zoomable Spectral Resolution

“…An imaging polarimeter captures the two-dimensional spatial polarization information of the target, which is widely used in biomedicine [28,29], industrial detection [30][31][32], de-scattering imaging [33][34][35][36], and other fields due to its ability in describing the roughness and contour of targets. The channel-modulated imaging spectropolarimeter (CMIS) [37][38][39] developed on the basis of FTIS can simultaneously obtain the spectra and full polarization information of the target, which has attracted significant attention for its compact structure and high stability.…”