Polarimetric underwater image recovery based on circularly polarized illumination and histogram stretching

Due to the backscattered light and signal attenuation, the underwater imaging could be severely degraded by the scattering media, especially in the case of strong scattering for dense turbid medium. Considering the circular polarization light can persist better its polarization property during propagating through turbid media compared with the linear polarization light. In this paper, we two polarimetric recovery methods based on the circularly polarized illumination. The first one is based on the combination of both linearly and circularly polarization information. The second one is an improved method for recovering the underwater image by combining histogram analysis. The real-world experiments shown that, by using circularly polarized illumination, the traditional polarimetric dehazing method is optimized which is suitable for use in the strong scattering environment, especially when the method is combined with histogram stretching.