Enhancing Visibility of Polarimetric Underwater Image by Transmittance Correction

Underwater vision can be severely degraded by the scattering media due to backscatter veiling and signal attenuation. In this paper, we focus on the case that the polarization effect of the object could not be neglected, and we propose a method for recovering the underwater image based on the transmittance correction, which transforms the transmittance for the low depolarized objects from negative values to the positive values that optimize the image quality with a simple algorithm of polynomial fitting. We show with a real-world experiment that with the method proposed in this paper, the quality of the underwater image can be effectively enhanced either for the object with high depolarization degree or for that with low depolarization degree. In particular, without sacrificing the quality of image recovery for the objects with high depolarization degree, the method proposed in this paper can achieve a better performance than the previous methods.