Monte Carlo study on polarization PSF for underwater imaging enhancement

Underwater imaging enhancement is challenging because the significant light attenuation along the propagation direction by the turbid water. Solving the problems caused by scattering is the core issue of improving underwater imaging. In recent years, generating a specific point spread function (PSF) has been one of the cornerstones of modern microscopy for turbid tissue, which showed that PSF still has potential for underwater imaging enhancement. As polarization imaging technology showed great potential to improve the underwater imaging, we propose to study the polarization point spread function (pPSF) of the turbid media. We used Monte Carlo method for studying optical transmission. We used polystyrene microspheres of two different diameters to be the scattering particles in the water. We studied PSF in forms of S0, S1, S2, S3, parallelly gated light and vertical gated light. The results showed that S3 has similar pattern with S0 and could be implied in 1D along polar direction. S1 was 90° rotationally symmetrical and should be studied in 2D. The pPSF of S1 changed from x direction to diagonal direction continuously along the azimuth with different speed varied with transport distance. Further study on these characteristics is of great potential for us to improve the underwater polarization imaging.