Addressing Once More the (Im)possibility of Color Reconstruction in Underwater Images

Color is an important cue in object recognition and classification problems. In underwater imagery, colors undergo strong distortion due to light propagation through an absorbing and scattering medium. Distortions depend on a number of complex phenomena, the most important being wavelength-dependent absorption and the sensitivity of sensors in trichromatic cameras. It has been shown previously that unique reconstruction in this case is not possible-at least for a simplified image formation model. In this paper, the authors use numerical simulations to demonstrate that this statement also holds for the underwater image formation model that is currently the most sophisticated.