Fig. 1. Real underwater imaging results. (a) Raw intensity image. (b) Reconstruction result by traditional polarization methods. (c) Ideal reconstruction result.

Fig. 2. Relationship between the degree of distortion of traditional polarization imaging methods and the target polarization information (DOP and AOP).

Fig. 3. Polarization imaging model. (a) Schematic of the propagation process of target information in an underwater environment. A three-dimensional coordinate system is established by taking the propagation direction of reflected light as the positive direction of the z axis into consideration. (b) Schematic of the relationship among the intensities of I_total, I_target, and I_scat. (c) Schematic of the relationship among the AOP of I_total, I_target, and I_scat.

Fig. 4. MI of T_p and S_p versus θ. (a) The whole curve of MI as a function of θ. (b) Zoom into the marked part of the plot (a).

Fig. 5. Schematic of the experimental setup.

Fig. 6. Experimental results. (a), (b), (c), and (d) are the intensity images obtained directly by the detector, and (e), (f), (g), and (h) are the reconstruction results obtained using the proposed method.

Fig. 7. Visualizing the improvement resulting from using the proposed method. (a) and (b) are intensity profiles along the white dotted lines in Figs. 6(a), 6(b), 6(e), and 6(f).

Fig. 8. Simulated images. (a) Clear image. (b) Total intensity image. (c), (d), (e), and (f) are the 0°, 45°, 90°, and 135° polarization subimages, respectively.

Fig. 9. Simulation results. The images in the first row represent the reconstruction results obtained using different methods, the images in the second row represent the differences between the reconstruction results obtained using different methods and the original clear image, and the data below the images in the second row represent the degree of distortion of different methods.