Fan FAN, Kecheng YANG^*, Min XIA, Wei LI, Bo FU, and Wei ZHANG

Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China

(Received January 5, 2010; Accepted March 9, 2010)

Although the use of blind deconvolution of image restoration is a widely known concept, only few reports have discussed in detail its application to solving problem of restoration of underwater range-gated laser images. A comparative study of underwater image restoration using the Richardson–Lucy algorithm, the least-squares algorithm, and the multiplicative iterative algorithm for blind deconvolution is presented. All the deconvolution approaches use denoised underwater images and Wells' small angle approximation theory of derived point spread function as the initial object and degradation guess, respectively. Owing the underwater no-reference imaging environment, image quality judgment based on the blur metric method is incorporated in our comparison to determine the appropriate deconvolution iteration number for each algorithm, which objectively evaluates the image restoration results. The performance of the three algorithms applied to underwater image restoration is discussed and reported.

Key words: underwater imaging, image restoration, blind deconvolution, Richardson–Lucy algorithm, least-squares algorithm, multiplicative iterative algorithm

^*E-mail address: yangkecheng@gmail.com