Seeing through water: Image restoration using model-based tracking

A video sequence of an underwater scene taken from above the water surface suffers from severe distortions due to water fluctuations. In this paper, we simultaneously estimate the shape of the water surface and recover the planar underwater scene without using any calibration patterns, image priors, multiple viewpoints or active illumination. The key idea is to build a compact spatial distortion model of the water surface using the wave equation. Based on this model, we present a novel tracking technique that is designed specifically for water surfaces and addresses two unique challenges—the absence of an object model or template and the presence of complex appearance changes in the scene due to water fluctuation. We show the effectiveness of our approach on both simulated and real scenes, with text and texture.