Underwater polarization de-scattering imaging method based on polarization characteristics and global transmittance estimation

Currently, many underwater polarization imaging methods are not suitable for scenes containing targets with different polarization properties because they often assume that the target reflected light is highly depolarized or that the degree of polarization of the light is constant and it will cause the loss of some targets’ energy in the restored image, affecting the overall contrast of the image. In this paper, in order to solve this problem, the intensity, the degree and angle of polarization of backscatter light in background region are calculated to further calculate the transmittance in this region, and then the global distribution of backscatter light’s intensity and transmittance are obtained by the extrapolation method. Since the influence of the angle of polarization of backscatter light on the transmittance calculation is considered and the transmittance is obtained by the extrapolation method, the calculated transmittance is more accurate and can ignore the influence of the polarization properties of the targets. Experiments results show that the proposed method is suitable for scenes containing targets with different polarization properties. In addition, the advantage of the method is proved by comparing with another underwater polarization imaging technology and the value of EME is increased by 30.7%.