Adaptive rule-based colour component weight assignment strategy for underwater video enhancement

Abstract

ABSTRACT Images and videos collected in an underwater environment often have low contrast, blur, and colour cast due to two significant sources of distortion; light scattering and absorption. In an underwater image/video, suspended particles attenuate red and blue components more than green channels. This article presents two adaptive weight allocation strategies based on rule assignment for red, green, and blue channels. Firstly, an improved balanced contrast enhancement technique (IBCET) is proposed using an adaptive contrast enhancement scheme based on colour component weight assignment. Secondly, a modified fuzzy contrast enhancement technique which obtains the intensification factor based on the weight of each component is developed. Finally, principal component analysis fusion is employed to improve the overall colour and contrast of the output video frames. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the standard underwater video dataset are demonstrated to validate the improved performance of the proposed algorithm.