Image enhancement for underwater pulsed laser line scan imaging system

Abstract

Recent progress in system hardware such as laser, photon detectors and other electronic and optical components resulted in significant improvement for the underwater serial laser imaging system. Nevertheless, during normal system operation, system issues such as laser instability, electronic noise, and environmental conditions such as imaging in highly turbid water can still put constraint on the performance of imager. In this work, post-processing to take advantage of the improvement hardware to further reduce image noise and enhance the image quality as a critical aspect of the overall system design is studied. A novel realization of the bilateral principle based image/pulse noise reduction and image deconvolution using point spread function (PSF) predicted with EODES radiative transfer model is used to implement the processing chain. The concept is further extended to a multichannel deconvolution to exploit the benefit offered by the new multi element PMT configuration developed in HBOI. Two datasets were used to test the developed techniques respectively.