The underwater imaging could be severely degraded by the scattering media due the backscatter veiling and signal attenuation. Image recovery based on polarization information has shown its efficiency in improving the quality of image in scattering medium, but few of them considered the effect of non-uniform optical field on the image recovery. In this paper, we consider the condition of non-uniform optical field, and we propose a method of retrieving the objects radiance based on estimating the degree of polarization (DOP) and the intensity of backscatter at different positions of the image. The experimental results demonstrate that the quality of the underwater image can be effectively enhanced by this method. In addition, compared with the previous methods, the method proposed in this paper can maintain a better performance at different positions of the image, thanks to considering the DOP and intensity of backscatter as spatial variables instead of constants.

A demand for division of focal plane (DoFP) polarization image sensors grows rapidly as nanofabrication technologies become mature. The DoFP sensor can output real time data of polarization information. In this paper, a novel visualization method for angle of polarization (AoP) is proposed for DoFP polarization image sensors. The data characteristics of AoP are analyzed, and strategies for a visualization method are proposed which conforms to the characteristics of AoP data. According to these strategies, we propose a visualization method for AoP data based on three dimensional HSI color space. This method uses intensity and saturation to characterize the magnitude of the angle between the polarization direction and the horizontal direction wherein the hue indicates the deflection direction. It is shown by the numerical simulation that the noise in the AoP image can be suppressed by our visualization method. In addition, the real-world experiment results are consistent with the numerical simulation and verify that the AoP image obtained by our method can suppress the influence of characterization noise, and the image is simple and intuitive, which is advantageous to human vision. The proposed method can be directly used for the commercialized DoFP polarization image sensor to display real-time AoP data.