Tracking and removal of suspended matter from underwater video images

We propose a method for obtaining clear underwater images by tracking the motion of suspended matter from video images captured in water and by separating the images into foreground and background. We assume that input images are the superposition of a foreground and a background, and constructed a transition model and the observation model. An input image is divided into patches and tracking of the foreground in each patch is performed while applying Kalman filter to separate the input images into the foreground and the background. From the result of the experiment using simulated images, we confirmed that the background images were successfully estimated and a region that was moving slowly was also recognized as a part of the background.