Enhancement of underwater vision by fully exploiting the polarization information from the Stokes vector

Underwater imaging method based on polarization information is extremely popular due to its ability to effectively remove the backscattered light. The Stokes vector contains the information of both the degree and angle of polarization of the light wave. However, this aspect has been rarely utilized in image reconstruction. In this study, an underwater polarimetric imaging model is established by fully exploiting this feature of Stokes vectors. The transmission of light wave is described in terms of the polarization information derived from the Stokes vector. Then, an optimization function is designed based on the independent characteristics of target light and backscattered light to estimate the target and backscattered field information. The real-world experiments and mean squared error analysis verify that the proposed method can remove the backscattered light and recover the target information accurately. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

The study establishes an underwater polarimetric imaging model by utilizing the characteristics of Stokes vectors, and designs an optimization function to remove backscattered light and accurately recover target information.