Retinex based underwater image enhancement using attenuation compensated color balance and gamma correction

Abstract

Underwater image is an important carrier of marine information. However, the problems of low contrast, color degradation, uneven illumination and detail loss cause the degradation of image quality. In this paper, we design a novel underwater image enhancement pipeline based on retinex. Firstly, we use bilateral filter instead of the traditional gaussian filter to estimate illumination image and obtain the reflectance image. Then, we design an attenuation map guided gray world method to overcome color distortion and use gamma correction to improve the illumination image. Finally, the fusion image is post-processed to further improve the contrast and obtain the final enhanced image. Qualitative and quantitative performance analysis prove that the proposed method has better performance than other underwater image enhancement methods.