Color Compensation of an Underwater Imaging System Using Electromagnetic Wave Propagation

Images can be obtained by collecting rays from objects. The characteristics of electromagnetic wave propagation depend on the medium. In particular, in an underwater imaging system, the interface between air and water must be considered. Further, reflection and transmission coefficients can be found by using electromagnetic theory. Because of the fact that the values of these coefficients differ according to the media, the recorded light intensities will change. A color image sensor has three different color channels. Therefore, the reflection and transmission coefficients have to be calculated individually. Thereafter, by using these coefficients, we can compensate for the color information of underwater objects. In this paper, we present a method to compensate for the color information of underwater objects by using electromagnetic wave propagation theory. To prove our method, we conducted optical experiments and evaluated the quality of the compensated image by a metric known as mean square error.