Underwater Image Colour Correction

When capturing images underwater, the water column imposes several effects on images that are negligible in air such as colour-dependant attenuation and lighting patterns. These effects cause problems for human interpretation of images and also confound automatic change analysis techniques. Research is focussing on exploiting the 3D structure of the scene generated using structure-from-motion techniques to correct for effects such a distance-based attenuation, vignetting and lighting pattern, improving the consistency of imagery and photo-textured 3D models.

Slide1_800 — Left, 3D photo-textured scene using standard underwater images as textures and right, 3D photo-textured scene using full water attenuation-colour corrected textures.

Publications

M. Bryson, M. Johnson-Roberson, O. Pizarro and S. Williams, “Repeatable Robotic Surveying of Marine Benthic Habitats for Monitoring Long-term Change”, Workshop on Robotics for Environmental Monitoring at Robotics: Science and Systems, Sydney, Australia, July 2012. [pdf]

M. Bryson, M. Johnson-Roberson, O. Pizarro and S. Williams, “Colour-Consistent Structure-from-Motion Models using Underwater Imagery”, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Sydney, Australia, July 2012. [pdf]