Estimation and removal of backscattered light with nonuniform polarization information in underwater environments

The nonuniform of polarization information of backscattered light has always been a neglected characteristic in polarization underwater imaging, but its accurate estimation plays an important role in the quality of imaging results. Traditional polarization imaging methods assume that the degree of polarization and angle of polarization of backscattered light are constant. In fact, the polarization information of backscattering light is gradual, this assumption makes traditional methods work only in a small area of the camera's field of view, in which the change of the polarization information of backscattered light can be ignored. In this paper, by analyzing the distribution of backscattered light, it is concluded that its polarization information has the characteristics of low-rank. Then, the degree of polarization and angle of polarization of backscattered light were estimated by low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition, and the clear scene was reconstructed. Experimental results show that the proposed method breaks through the limitation of the assumption of backscattered light in traditional polarization imaging method, and expands the detection field under the same conditions, which makes it possible to develop polarization underwater imaging method to the direction of large field of view detection.