Underwater Optical Image Restoration Method for Natural/Artificial Light

Abstract

This paper investigates the underwater optical image restoration method under the background of underwater target detection based on optical vision in AUVs. The light source used for AUV detection is different when the AUV operates in different depths. The natural light source is used in shallow water and the artificial light source is used in deep water. This paper investigates underwater optical image restoration in these two light conditions. Aiming at the problem of image blurring in underwater optical images, the traditional underwater image restoration method based on scattering model can obtain satisfactory image restoration performance in natural light conditions. However, it cannot obtain the same image restoration result in artificial light conditions. To solve this problem, this paper presents an improved underwater optical image restoration method based on the scattering model. The scattering model and power spectrum are used to solve the initial parameters of the filter, and the parameters are optimized based on an evaluation index. The index of image definition is introduced to evaluate the restoration performance and to achieve the satisfactory image restoration result in both natural light and artificial light conditions. The effectiveness of the presented method is verified by experiments.

Keywords

• image restoration
• underwater environment
• natural light
• artificial light
• scattering model