An Improved Approach for Underwater Image Enhancement Through Color Correction, Contrast Synthesis and Dehazing

Abstract

This paper proposed an improved approach to enhance the quality of underwater images without the aid of any specialized hardware. The proposed method consists of three steps including color correction, contrast synthesis and dehazing. The color correction removes the color cast problem, contrast synthesis removes under-exposure problem and dehazing removes the fuzz problem. In the proposed method, color correction, contrast synthesis and dehazing are developed based on a statistical method, Retinex-model and utilizing the dark channel prior information respectively. After removing these three difficulties the quality of the enhanced underwater images is compared with the baseline approaches based on the value of chroma, contrast and saturation. The proposed method obtains Underwater Color Image Quality Evaluation (UCIQE)value 0.66574 which is the best among the methods compared.