Underwater Single-Photon Profiling Under Turbulence and High Attenuation Environment

Underwater single-photon imaging is challenging, as the transmitting path presents turbulence and strong backscattering noise; both facts degrade the image, thus hindering its applications in real world. However, current studies on underwater single-photon modeling have generally overlooked the potential impact of water turbulence on imaging performance. This oversight may result in an inaccurate characterization of the optical propagation process in realistic imaging environment. This letter proposed a joint denoising and deblurring method with regularization by denoising (JDD-RED) for underwater single-photon image that include the modeling of turbulence and the tailored restoration model, improving the performance by considering blurring mechanism, as well as advanced signal processing method. This method is validated on numerical experiments by employing joint deblurring and denoising tasks. Compared with the PICK-3-D algorithm, the JDD-RED reconstruction results demonstrate that more detailed information can be retained while denoising. In addition, the results show an average improvement of 1.48 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and 60% in structural similarity (SSIM), proving the superior performance of the JDD-RED algorithm.