Denoising, Edge Aware Restoration and Enhancement of Single Shallow Coastal Water Image

Abstract

The dissolved particles and their resultant scattering are the underlying cause of low contrast and blur thereby producing poor quality underwater images. Single-shot shallow coastal underwater images are much in need of the preprocessing steps viz. image enhancement and restoration. The underwater image processing operations like classification, object detection and computer vision require an enhancement/restoration preprocessing. The paper aims to restore the visibility of objects in turbid water images with its effective edge aware restoration cum enhancement model. The restricted rolling guidance filter on the DCP-based restoration method produces better edge aware restoration and denoised output image. The model-based (MB) dark channel prior (DCP) along with an edge emphasis and contrast enhancement achieves the essential dehazing and improvement in contrast for the heavily blurred underwater images. The subjective and objective projections are an evidence for the same. This edge preserving and denoising nature of the model is also exhibited with comparisons made with promising algorithms over the decade.