RollingPol: Single-Shot Polarization Imaging for Underwater Sensing

Abstract

Underwater optical sensing is severely degraded by backscattered light from suspended particles. While polarization-based image enhancement methods can suppress this backscattering effect, existing methods are either costly, or require sequential image captures that do not handle dynamic scenes. Recently, learning-based enhancement methods have shown promising results, but they depend on large paired datasets that are difficult to obtain underwater and introduce noise or artifacts due to domain gaps.