Improvement of Underwater Color Discriminative Ability by Multispectral Imaging

RGB imaging, which senses three components of color: red, green and blue, is widely used to capture colors in underwater environment. Unfortunately, the ability of color discrimination suffers from wavelength-dependent attenuation, specifically the intensive attenuation of red and blue light. Compared with 3-channel RGB imaging, multispectral contains more imaging bands, thus contributing to finer discrimination on underwater color or spectrum. In this study, quantitative comparison of color discrimination between underwater RGB and multispectral imaging is made through spectral angle mapping. Experimental result shows an improvement of 48.99 % in underwater color discrimination by multispectral imaging over RGB imaging.