Low illumination underwater light field images reconstruction using deep convolutional neural networks

Underwater optical images are usually influenced by low lighting, high turbidity scattering and wavelength absorption. To solve these issues, a great deal of work has been performed to improve the quality of underwater images. Most of them use the high-intensity LEDs for lighting to obtain the high contrast images. However, in high turbidity water, high-intensity LEDs cause strong scattering and absorption. In this paper, we propose a light field imaging approach for solving underwater imaging problems in a low-intensity light environment. As a solution, we tackle the problem of de-scattering from light field images by using deep convolutional neural networks with depth estimation. Furthermore, a spectral characteristic-based color correction method is used for recovering the color reduction. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by challenging real-world underwater imaging.