Visibility enhancement of underwater images based on active polarized illumination and average filtering technology

Abstract Underwater imaging is a crucial and challenging problem. The backscattering caused by particles in turbid water can severely degrade the image. In this paper, A novel image dehazing method is devised, which combines optics with image processing technology. This method can directly remove part of the backscattering through polarization technology, and then quickly solve the dehazing image through our algorithm. Experimental results show that our method is valid and robust for targets of diverse materials, grayscale images and color images in diverse scattering environments. Furthermore, our method takes only 2 percent of the time of the fast dark channel prior (DCP) method when processing 1 K resolution images, which meets the requirements of real-time.