Title
Active polarization descattering.
Abstract
Vision in scattering media is important but challenging. Images suffer from poor visibility due to backscattering and attenuation. Most prior methods for scene recovery use active illumination scanners (structured and gated), which can be slow and cumbersome, while natural illumination is inapplicable to dark environments. The current paper addresses the need for a non-scanning recovery method, that uses active scene irradiance. We study the formation of images under widefield artificial illumination. Based on the formation model, the paper presents an approach for recovering the object signal. It also yields rough information about the 3D scene structure. The approach can work with compact, simple hardware, having active widefield, polychromatic polarized illumination. The camera is fitted with a polarization analyzer. Two frames of the scene are taken, with different states of the analyzer or polarizer. A recovery algorithm follows the acquisition. It allows both the backscatter and the object reflection to be partially polarized. It thus unifies and generalizes prior polarization-based methods, which had assumed exclusive polarization of either of these components. The approach is limited to an effective range, due to image noise and illumination falloff. Thus, the limits and noise sensitivity are analyzed. We demonstrate the approach in underwater field experiments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/TPAMI.2008.85
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.
Keywords
Field
DocType
non-scanning recovery method,scene recovery use,active widefield,illumination falloff,active illumination scanner,widefield artificial illumination,active polarization descattering,natural illumination,active scene irradiance,scene structure,recovery algorithm,computer vision,attenuation,artificial intelligence,inverse problems,polarisation,algorithms,lighting,polarization,light scattering,backscatter,light,color,field experiment,optical scattering,layout,image noise,refractometry
Computer vision,Visibility,Computer science,Polarizer,Backscatter,Image noise,Artificial intelligence,Image restoration,Optical polarization,Luminance,Depth of field
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
31
3
0162-8828
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
34
2.20
19
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tali Treibitz117813.09
Yoav Y. Schechner262958.12