Program item

33rd Color and Imaging Conference

Underwater Colorimetry

SC11

HANDS-ON Underwater Colorimetry
Instructor: Derya Akkaynak, University of Haifa & IUI Eilat
Level: Introductory
Duration: 4 hours
Course Time: 8:30 - 12:45

Benefits
This course enables the attendee to:

Learn which equation is appropriate to use in cases of attenuation i) in the atmosphere and ii) underwater.
Discover the variations commonly encountered in the optical conditions in the atmosphere and in natural bodies of water, and how these affect images.
Find out how to design an experiment or an image acquisition workflow so colors captured in a scene under a scattering medium can be used as scientific data.

Course Description
The most used image formation model is for clear air, which is a non-attenuating medium. When we take photos in a medium that is attenuating, such as in haze or fog or in any natural body of water, the RGB values captured in a raw image no longer represent the radiance just from the scene; they also contain radiance added due to the scattering in the medium itself. The goal of this short course is to familiarize scientists and others working on color-sensitive applications with the equations that govern image formation in scattering media and to provide the tools needed for designing imaging experiments in scattering media so colors can be captured in an objective and repeatable manner and be used as scientific data.

Intended Audience: scientists, engineers, students, and others interested in learning more about capture and scattering.

Derya Akkaynak is assistant professor in the Marine Technologies Department at the University of Haifa, jointly with the Interuniversity Institute of Marine Sciences in Eilat. She has BSc and MSc degrees in aerospace engineering, and a PhD in mechanical and oceanographic engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She leads the Laboratory for Computational Optics and Light in the Ocean Realm (COLOR Lab) in Eilat, conducting research on light, vision, and optics in the ocean.