Polarization remote sensing of ships in sea haze

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sea haze reduces the visibility of ships and makes the optical imaging system blind, which increases the difficulty of ship remote sensing. In this paper, we propose a new method for polarization remote sensing of ships in sea haze. The method takes advantage of image haze removal and exposure correction to improve the visibility of ships in sea haze. Different from the existing polarization-based image haze removal methods, the proposed method does not depend on any assumptions about the polarization properties of incident light. The exposure correction method is proposed based on the Retinex model and Bayes theorem, which can improve the visibility of ships in haze removal images. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we implemented an outdoor experiment on polarization remote sensing of ships in sea haze weather. The experimental results indicate that the method can improve the visibility of ships significantly. In addition, the method outperforms the Stokes parameter-based ship remote sensing method in terms of the image quality metric fog aware density evaluator and can be easily generalized to RGB image haze removal.