Impact on the Medium MTF by Model Estimation of b

The effect of suspended particles in a water medium on the transport of light is normally dichotomized into two processes. Namely, the dual effects of absorption and scattering. Absorption simply acts to remove photons which might have contributed to image formation. Such attrition effects might be overcome for a given system by increasing the source flux or by using a more sensitive receiver. Scattering, however, produces two more pernicious effects. Scattering can produce a foreground veiling glare which reduces the effective contrast of the target with respect to the background, and by causing a redistribution of the trajectories of image forming photons, scrambles the information content originally presented by the target and background. The modulation transfer function (MTF) is used to characterize the effects the medium has on the passage of image forming light. Wells has derived a transformation which converts the medium volume scattering function, Beta (theta), into a medium MTF expression via the use of a 'decay' function. The MTF expression so derived requires the value of the total (volume) scattering coefficient, b.