Active non-uniform illumination-based underwater polarization imaging method for objects with complex polarization properties

Active polarization imaging is one of the most effective underwater optical imaging methods that can eliminate the degradation of image contrast and clarity caused by macro-molecule scattering. However, the non-uniformity of active illumination and the diversity of object polarization properties may decrease the quality of underwater imaging. This paper proposes a non-uniform illumination-based active polarization imaging method for underwater objects with complex optical properties. Firstly, illumination homogenization in the frequency domain is proposed to extract and homogenize the natural incident light from the total receiving light. Then, the weight values of the polarized and non-polarized images are computed according to each pixel’s degree of linear polarization (DoLP) in the original underwater image. By this means, the two images can be fused to overcome the problem of reflected light loss generated by the complex polarization properties of underwater objects. Finally, the fusion image is normalized as the final result of the proposed underwater polarization imaging method. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that the presented method can effectively eliminate the uneven brightness of the whole image and obtain the underwater fusion image with significantly improved contrast and clarity. In addition, the ablation experiment of different operation combinations shows that each component of the proposed method has noticeable enhancement effects on underwater polarization imaging. Our codes are available in Code 1.