Visualizing Underwater Ocean Optics


Diego Gutiérrez
Universidad de Zaragoza
Francisco J. Serón
Universidad de Zaragoza
Adolfo Muñoz
Universidad de Zaragoza
Óscar Ansón
Universidad de Zaragoza

EUROGRAPHICS 2008. Volume 27, 2, (2008)

teaser


Abstract:
Simulating the in-water ocean light field is a daunting task. Ocean waters are one of the richest participating media, where light interacts not only with water molecules, but with suspended particles and organic matter as well. The concentration of each constituent greatly affects these interactions, resulting in very different hues. Inelastic scattering events such as fluorescence or Raman scattering imply energy transfers that are usually neglected in the simulations. Our contributions in this paper are a bio-optical model of ocean waters suitable for computer graph- ics simulations, along with an improved method to obtain an accurate solution of the in-water light field based
on radiative transfer theory. The method provides a link between the inherent optical properties that define the medium and its apparent optical properties, which describe how it looks. The bio-optical model of the ocean uses published data from oceanography studies. For inelastic scattering we compute all frequency changes at higher and lower energy values, based on the spectral quantum efficiency function of the medium. The results shown prove the usability of the system as a predictive rendering algorithm. Areas of application for this research span from underwater imagery to remote sensing; the resolution method is general enough to be usable in any type of participating medium simulation.

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BibTeX:
@ARTICLE{Gutierrez08_eg,
 author = {Diego Gutierrez and Francisco Seron and Adolfo Muñoz and Oscar Anson},
 title = {Visualizing Underwater Ocean Optics},
 journal = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of EUROGRAPHICS)},
 year = {2008},
 volume = {27},
 number = {2},
 pages = {547--556},
 }