Hue preserving‐based approach for underwater colour image enhancement

Abstract

In this study, a novel underwater colour image enhancement approach based on hue preserving is presented by combining hue-saturation-intensity (HSI) and HS-value (HSV) colour models. In this study, the proposed wavelet-domain filtering (WDF) and constrained histogram stretching (CHS) algorithms are operated on HSI and HSV colour models, respectively. The degraded image is first converted from red-green-blue colour model into the HSI colour model, wherein the hue component H is preserved and WDF algorithm is executed on the S and I components. Similarly, the image is further converted into the HSV colour model, wherein H component is kept invariant as well and CHS algorithm is applied on the S and V components. The authors' key contribution is that the H preserving method can improve image quality in terms of contrast, colour rendition, non-uniform illumination, and denoising. In addition, experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms several other state-of-the-art algorithms.