Fast processing of underwater polarization imaging based on optical correlation

Underwater polarization differential imaging requires the estimation of different parameters, and the parameters can be accurately obtained by using optical correlation. However, optical correlation as a criterion function to estimate parameters takes a lot of time. To expedite the parameters’ estimation process, we propose two operations to process underwater polarization images. One operation is to update the analyzer angle range to reduce the number of processed images. The other is image downsampling, which reduces the amount of calculation for the corresponding images. In experiments, we confirmed the feasibility of our method. We have obtained an average of 42 times the calculation speed increase under the conditions of updating the analyzer angle range 3 times and reducing the image scale by 16 times. The results of our method are consistent with those of traditional methods. This established method is conducive to the practical application of underwater polarization differential imaging.