Abstract
Images obtained in an underwater environment are often affected by colour casting and suffer from poor visibility and lack of contrast. In the literature, there are many enhancement algorithms that improve different aspects of the underwater imagery. Each paper, when presenting a new algorithm or method, usually compares the proposed technique with some alternatives present in the current state of the art. There are no studies on the reliability of benchmarking methods, as the comparisons are based on various subjective and objective metrics. This paper would pave the way towards the definition of an effective methodology for the performance evaluation of the underwater image enhancement techniques. Moreover, this work could orientate the underwater community towards choosing which method can lead to the best results for a given task in different underwater conditions. In particular, we selected five well-known methods from the state of the art and used them to enhance a dataset of images produced in various underwater sites with different conditions of depth, turbidity, and lighting. These enhanced images were evaluated by means of three different approaches: objective metrics often adopted in the related literature, a panel of experts in the underwater field, and an evaluation based on the results of 3D reconstructions.
Highlights
The scattering and absorption of light causes the quality degradation of underwater images
This goal requires the benchmarking of different image enhancement methods to figure out which one performs better in different environmental and illumination conditions
We have selected five well-known state-of-the-art methods of the enhancement of images taken on various underwater sites with five different environmental and illumination conditions
Summary
The scattering and absorption of light causes the quality degradation of underwater images. The benchmark presented in this research is a part of the iMARECULTURE project [1,2,3], which aims to develop new tools and technologies to improve the public awareness of underwater cultural heritage It includes the development of a Virtual Reality environment that reproduces faithfully the appearance of underwater sites, offering the possibility to visualize the archaeological remains as they would appear in air. We published another work [4] in which we selected five methods from the state of the art and used them to enhance a dataset of images produced in various underwater sites at heterogeneous conditions of depth, turbidity and lighting.
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