@article{article_494348, title={Phase Contrast Enhancement Combined with Dark Channel Prior for Underwater Target Recognition}, journal={The Eurasia Proceedings of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics}, pages={74–81}, year={2018}, author={Amer, Khadidja Ould and Elbouz, Marwa and Alfalou, Ayman}, keywords={Underwater image,Polarization,Image dehazing,Correlation,Phase contrast}, abstract={ The major obstacle to the detection and identification of objects in underwater images is often due to their poor quality. Underwater images are known to be strongly degraded by light absorption and scattering. It is therefore very important to improve the quality of the images to facilitate the objects detection. For this purpose, we propose to combine a hardware and software techniques for image quality improvement. The first by using a polarimetric imaging optical system to reduce the scattering effects when acquiring images. The second by apply a Dark Channel Prior (DCP) dehazing method to the obtained polarized images. This approach has the advantage to be fast and efficient, because it does not require many software processing to improve the image quality. In this paper we validate our approach by introducing it into a complete process of target identification based on phase contrast enhancement and target recognition. Experiments carried out in our laboratory have shown that this approach greatly improves the target identification. }, number={4}, publisher={ISRES Publishing}