Seeing through water

We consider the problem of recovering an underwater image distorted by surface waves. A large amount of video data of the distorted image is acquired. The problem is posed in terms of finding an undistorted im- age patch at each spatial location. This challenging reconstruction task can be formulated as a manifold learning problem, such that the center of the manifold is the image of the undistorted patch. To compute the center, we present a new technique to estimate global distances on the manifold. Our technique achieves robustness through convex flow com- putations and solves the "leakage" problem inherent in recent manifold embedding techniques.