Improving Marker-Based Tracking for Augmented Reality in Underwater Environments

Abstract

Underwater sites are a challenging environment for augmented reality. Images taken under water are degraded in several ways, most importantly they are affected by unbalanced colors due to uneven absorption of light in each color channel, blurring and desaturation caused by turbidity, or noise due to the presence of larger organisms, plants, or bubbles. In this paper, we introduce a new method based on white balancing that enhances underwater images to improve the results of detection of markers. We compare this method with several image enhancement methods, and evaluate their performance when applied to the problem of detecting markers under water. Our results show that our method improves the detection in underwater environments while keeping the computation time low.