Approach to sunflicker removal for underwater image
ZhenYou Dai, Xin Wang, Jian Yang · Journal of Electronic Imaging · 2015
Sunflicker is a common phenomenon observed in shallow water districts, which severely degrades underwater image quality. However, very few studies have addressed this problem. In this paper, we propose a method to remove sunflicker, which takes the sunflicker distribution amount (SDA) into consideration. The images without sunflicker are approximately recovered by applying principal component analysis theory to a small number of registered images of the same scene. Based on the fact that the difference between the originally registered image and the approximately recovered image includes lost details with high frequencies and sunflicker with low frequencies, a low-pass filter is applied to the difference to obtain pure sunflicker and subsequently reap the image details. The visual inspection, histogram analysis, and comparison approach with motion-compensated filtering are conducted under conditions of different SDAs. Relevant results demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.