Three-dimensional visualization of objects in scattering medium using integral imaging and spectral analysis

Abstract This paper presents a three-dimensional visualization method of 3D objects in a scattering medium. The proposed method employs integral imaging and spectral analysis to improve the visual quality of 3D images. The images observed from 3D objects in the scattering medium such as turbid water suffer from image degradation due to scattering. The main reason is that the observed image signal is very weak compared with the scattering signal. Common image enhancement techniques including histogram equalization and contrast enhancement works improperly to overcome the problem. Thus, integral imaging that enables to integrate the weak signals from multiple images was discussed to improve image quality. In this paper, we apply spectral analysis to an integral imaging system such as the computational integral imaging reconstruction. Also, we introduce a signal model with a visibility parameter to analyze the scattering signal. The proposed method based on spectral analysis efficiently estimates the original signal and it is applied to elemental images. The visibility-enhanced elemental images are then used to reconstruct 3D images using a computational integral imaging reconstruction algorithm. To evaluate the proposed method, we perform the optical experiments for 3D objects in turbid water. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods.