Impact of Dehazing on Underwater Marker Detection for Augmented Reality

Underwater augmented reality is a very challenging task and amongst several issues, one of the most crucial aspects involves real-time tracking. Particles present in water combined with the uneven absorption of light decrease the visibility in the underwater environment. Dehazing methods are used in many areas to improve the quality of digital image data that is degraded by the influence of the environment. This paper describes the visibility conditions affecting underwater scenes and shows existing dehazing techniques that successfully improve the quality of underwater images. Four underwater dehazing methods are selected for evaluation of their capability of improving the success of square marker detection in underwater videos. Two reviewed methods represent approaches of image restoration: Multi-Scale Fusion, and Bright Channel Prior. Another two methods evaluated, the Automatic Color Enhancement and the Screened Poisson Equation, are methods of image enhancement. The evaluation uses diverse test data set to evaluate different environmental conditions. Results of the evaluation show an increased number of successful marker detections in videos pre-processed by dehazing algorithms and evaluate the performance of each compared method. The Screened Poisson method performs slightly better to other methods across various tested environments, while Bright Channel Prior and Automatic Color Enhancement shows similarly positive results.