Sea surface target image enhancement method based on separable reflection and refraction

In marine target detection, sun glint is a strong source of interference, which causes a large area of pixel saturation during imaging, making it difficult to effectively distinguish between the target and the sea surface background. To address the problem of sun glint interfering with target imaging, we first simulate and analyze the multi-angle polarization characteristics of rough sea surface seawater according to the Cox-Munk rough sea surface probabilistic statistical model. Secondly, we propose the constraints that the refracted light information of seawater can be effectively separated at the near-horizontal observation zenith angle, and the polarization orthogonal decomposition principle is utilized to realize the separation of reflected and refracted light of seawater. Finally, we refer to the underwater imaging model and propose an equivalent model of target imaging under sun glint interference. The light intensity information of the sea surface background and the target is equivalently replaced by the light intensity information of the reflected and refracted light of seawater, which further solves the target image without the interference of sun glint. The results show that our method not only realizes the enhancement of the target image based on the suppression of the sea surface sun glint, but also preserves the texture information of the sea surface. The method is of great practical significance for the search and rescue of people overboard as well as the monitoring of marine ecological environment.