Underwater Light Field Depth Map Restoration Using Deep Convolutional Neural Fields

Abstract

Underwater optical images are usually influenced by low lighting, high turbidity scattering and wavelength absorption. In order to solve these issues, a great deal of work has been used to improve the quality of underwater images. Most of them used the high-intensity LED for lighting to obtain the high contrast images. However, in high turbidity water, high-intensity LED causes strong scattering and absorption. In this paper, we firstly propose a light field imaging approach for solving underwater depth map estimation problems in low-intensity lighting environment. As a solution, we tackle the problem of de-scattering from light field images by using deep convolutional neural fields in depth estimation. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method through challenging real world underwater imaging.