Undersea imagery is awesome. It shows us the parallel world of creatures, coral reefs and whatnot which covers about 75% of our planet Earth. There are a plethora of cameras which record and stream underwater videos and images, ranging from analog cameras which are still widely used in commercial diving to HD and even 2K cameras streaming digital undersea video. However, water is different in the way it scatters light and visibility as a diver or an ROV goes further down. The visibility and the colors we see in undersea imagery are very sensitive to the depth as well as the equipment used. Most cameras do not have any “undersea filter” which can clean up your awesome scuba dive or in the case of commercial diving, you may miss visual details of important underwater infrastructure you were trying to inspect.
Applying a “magical filter” on these underwater images and videos to bring out their true colors is a challenging task in computer vision. Today, we’re introducing just that, and a bit more. CUVI now offers a new enhance function which can automagically clean up underwater images and videos. Not only this, but we have super accelerated it so you can clean up your videos in real-time.
In part-2 of this post, I’ll show how CUVI enhancer cleans up undersea videos.
Also, you can try out the enhancer for your own images as well with our CUVI online demo. Provide a link to your photo (we’re adding the ability to upload photos as well) and select “Enhance” from the dropdown list and click Process!
Image Credits: bishop museum, pacatrue and experience andamans
CUVIlib - CUDA Vision & Imaging Library - is a simple to use, GPU accelerated computer vision SDK. The library is available for download for free for personal unlimited use. For more information, visit our website at cuvilib.com.