Engineer Created Algorithm That Can Remove Strong Blue-Green Color Cast and Backscatter from Underwater Photographs
November 15th, 2019Not Photoshop levels, hue, saturation, etc.
Wild results.
Via: PetaPixel:
An engineer has developed a computer program that can, in her words, “remove the water” from an underwater photograph. The result is a “physically accurate” image with all of the vibrance, saturation and color of a regular landscape photo.
The technology, called Sea-thru, was developed by oceanographer and engineer Derya Akkaynak while she was a post-doctoral fellow under Tali Treibitz at the University of Haifa, and it has the potential to revolutionize underwater photography. While “remove the water” isn’t the most scientific explanation for how the technology works, as you can see in the Scientific American feature above, that’s more or less what it does.
By automatically removing the color cast and backscatter caused by the way light moves through a body of water, she’s able to capture underwater landscapes as they would look to the human eye on dry land—in other words: if all the water were gone.
The concept is pretty ingenious – take the color card with you. The result is amazing. No telling how much beauty this will reveal. But this is bound to advance underwater science in fantastic and unpredictable ways. Very cool.