Depth Map Reconstruction for Underwater Kinect Camera Using Inpainting and Local Image Mode Filtering

Underwater optical cameras are widely used for security monitoring in ocean, such as earthquake prediction and tsunami alarming. Optical cameras recognize objects for autonomous underwater vehicles and provide security protection for sea-floor networks. However, there are many issues for underwater optical imaging, such as forward and backward scattering, light absorption, and sea snow. Many underwater image processing techniques have been proposed to overcome these issues. Among these techniques, the depth map gives important information for many applications of the post-processing. In this paper, we propose a Kinect-based underwater depth map estimation method that uses a captured coarse depth map by Kinect with the loss of depth information. To overcome the drawbacks of low accuracy of coarse depth maps, we propose a corresponding reconstruction architecture that uses the underwater dual channels prior dehazing model, weighted enhanced image mode filtering, and inpainting. Our proposed method considers the influence of mud sediments in water and performs better than the traditional methods. The experimental results demonstrated that, after inpainting, dehazing, and interpolation, our proposed method can create high-accuracy depth maps.