In underwater imaging scenarios, the scattering media could cause severe image degradation due to the backscatter veiling as well as signal attenuation. In this paper, we consider the polarization effect of the object, and propose a method of retrieving the objects radiance based on estimating the polarized-difference image of the target signal. We show with a real-world experiment that by taking into account the polarized-difference image of the target signal additionally, the quality of the underwater image can be effectively enhanced, which is particularly effective in the cases where both the object radiance and the backscatter contribute to the polarization, such as underwater detection of the artifact objects.
In polarimetric imaging, the uneven illumination could cause the significant spatial intensity fluctuations in the scene, and thus hampers the target detection. In this paper, we propose a method of illumination compensation and contrast optimization for Stokes polarimetric imaging, which allows significantly increasing the performance of target detection under uneven illumination. We show with numerical simulation and real-world experiment that, based on the intensity information contained in the polarization information, the contrast can be effectively enhanced by proper approach, which is of particular importance in practical applications with spatial illumination fluctuations, such as remote sensing.
We consider the typical Stokes polarimetry system, which performs four intensity measurements to estimate a Stokes vector. We show that if the total integration time of intensity measurements is fixed, the variance of the Stokes vector estimator depends on the distribution of the integration time at four intensity measurements. Therefore, by optimizing the distribution of integration time, the variance of the Stokes vector estimator can be decreased. In this paper, we obtain the closed-form solution of the optimal distribution of integration time by employing Lagrange multiplier method. According to the theoretical analysis and real-world experiment, it is shown that the total variance of the Stokes vector estimator can be significantly decreased about 40% in the case discussed in this paper. The method proposed in this paper can effectively decrease the measurement variance and thus statistically improves the measurement accuracy of the polarimetric system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.