Optimized underwater light attenuation prior-based depth estimation and adaptive feature fusion CNN for underwater image and video enhancement

Abstract

Underwater images and videos play an essential communication tool in exploring ocean resources and understanding underwater scene perception. The underwater imaging environment and the complex lighting conditions degrade the quality of the images and make them low contrast, color deviation, and blurring. These degraded images lack effective target recognition information, significantly impacting the performance of underwater application systems. To solve the above issues, a new module for underwater video as well as image enhancement is proposed. The input video is given to the frame extraction phase for converting the video into the frame. Thereafter, the blur detection and determination are done using Laplacian's variance technique for determining blurred images. The depth estimation is done using Underwater Light Attenuation Prior (ULAP), wherein coefficients are determined using the proposed Competitive Multi-Verse bird swarm Optimization (CMVBSO). The CMVBSO is combined by integrating a competitive multiverse optimizer (CMVO) and a Bird Swarm Algorithm (BSA). The blurred value, input video frame and depth estimated output are given to adaptive feature fusion CNN in which training is done utilizing Manta-Ray Foraging Lion Optimization (MRLLO). The pixel enhancement is carried out using a Type II Fuzzy system and Cuckoo Search optimization algorithm filter (T2FCS) filter. The proposed CMVBSO_ULAP provided better performance with a Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of 35.037 dB, Mean square error (MSE) of 3.684, Structural similarity index (SSIM) of 0.911, underwater image quality measure (UIQM) of 5.266 and Underwater Color Image Quality Evaluation (UCIQE) of 0.818 respectively.