Advanced Visualization Polarimetric Imaging: Removal of Water Spray Effect Utilizing Circular Polarization

Fei Liu,Pingli Han,Xiaopeng Shao,Xuan Li

doi:10.3390/app11072996

Abstract

Circular polarization (CP) memory is a well-known phenomenon whereby natural light becomes partially circularly polarized after scattering by water spray several times, and the circularly polarized state can be well preserved within a certain propagation distance. In this study, a CP imaging method combined with the multi-scale analysis in the frequency domain is proposed to enhance the vision in rainy conditions. The images were first decomposed into multi-scales. CP characteristics of light were employed in the low-frequency parts to improve the quality of images in rainy conditions, and the high-frequency parts compensated specific structure information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can remove the water spray effect thereby improving the vision of degraded rainy-day images.

Highlights

Techniques for imaging through turbid media have recently received considerable attention because of their potential applications such as atmosphere remote sensing, underwater photography, and even biomedical imaging [1,2,3]
The major difficulty encountered in these techniques is the loss of directionality of the incident light caused by multiple scattering among particles, which leads to degradation of the image quality [4,5,6]
By retaining and displaying polarization differences between airlight and the direct transmission of light through an object in polarization images, polarimetric imaging can make it possible to enhance the visibility and contrast of images taken through turbid media

Summary

Introduction

Techniques for imaging through turbid media have recently received considerable attention because of their potential applications such as atmosphere remote sensing, underwater photography, and even biomedical imaging [1,2,3]. Linear polarization (LP)-based methods rarely show satisfactory recovery results when it comes to rainy-day images.

Results

Conclusion