Specular reflection removal of ocean surface remote sensing images from UAVs

Abstract

Images captured by UAVs above the sea surface often contain lots of highlight regions due to the specular reflection of solar radiation on the non-flat sea surface. The existence of a great deal of specular highlight components may cover the objects under the water which is negative to those applications based on the UAV remote sensing images. In this paper, we present a method to remove the specular reflection on the RGB images of ocean surface. The intensity of specular highlight components is much larger than that of diffuse components in the images, simply subtracting the highlight component form the original image will leave a lot of holes. So our method contains two main steps: highlight regions detection and restoration of those regions. We use the method based on the intensity ratio to extract the regions affected by the specular reflection. Then we use the local information around those highlight regions to restore the intensity of those pixels. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively remove the specular reflection and keep details of ocean surface images.