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Underwater imaging plays an important role in underwater scientific research, biological monitoring, underwater rescue, and military defense. However, the scattering and absorption of particles in the scattering medium lead to the distortion of the originally ordered wavefront phase and the image degradation. Polarimetric imaging technology has become an effective method for underwater image recovery based on its unique advantages. However, traditional polarimetric techniques require mechanically rotating the linear polarizer to find the two images that are brightest (the backscattered light is maximally through the polarizer) and darkest (the backscattered light is maximally blocked by the polarizer). Most polarimetric imaging techniques combined with conventional methods require the presence of a background region in the image to estimate the characteristics of backscattered light. There are also some polarimetric imaging methods that do not require a background area in the image, but most of them require prior knowledge and complex algorithms. All these greatly affect the real-time application of polarimetric imaging technology. In this paper, a rapid automatic underwater image recovery method based on polarimetric imaging is proposed. We optimize the traditional polarimetric imaging method based on the scattering imaging model and solve the problem that the traditional method requires an unsupervised image quality evaluation index to correct the intermediate parameters and selecting the background region, which realize the scattering suppression for the underwater image without background region. The experimental results show that our method can process a 320,000-pixel image in only 0.007 seconds. The proposed method can be applied to the current polarimetric imaging instrument system and has a good effect on underwater image recovery, and the recovery results are almost without distortion. It has strong robustness and is also applicable to images without background region, which provide a promising application prospect in the field of underwater imaging.
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