Improving underwater visibility using vignetting correction

Underwater survey videos of the seafloor are usually plagued with heavy vignetting (radial falloff) outside of the light source beam footprint on the seabed. In this paper we propose a novel multi-frame approach for removing this vignetting phenomenon which involves estimating the light source footprint on the seafloor, and the parameters for our proposed vignetting model. This estimation is accomplished in a bayesian framework with an iterative SVD-based optimization. Within the footprint, we leave the image contents as is, whereas outside this region, we perform vignetting correction. Our approach does not require images with different exposure values or recovery of the camera response function, and is entirely based on the attenuation experienced by point correspondences accross multiple frames. We verify our algorithm with both synthetic and real data, and then compare it with an existing technique. Results obtained show significant improvement in the fidelity of the restored images.

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10793/947

Citation

K. Sooknanan ; A. Kokaram ; D. Corrigan ; G. Baugh ; J. Wilson ; N. Harte, 2012. Improving underwater visibility using vignetting correction. Proc. SPIE 8305, Visual Information Processing and Communication III, 83050M, February; doi:10.1117/12.909134.