Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Adaptive Color Correction and Improved Retinex Algorithm

Abstract

In order to solve the problems about color distortion and low contrast of underwater images, we propose an underwater image enhancement algorithm that combines adaptive color correction with improved Retinex algorithm. Our algorithm is a single-image enhancement method that does not require specialized hardware and underwater scenes prior. Firstly, the adaptive color correction is carried out on the underwater distorted images to solve the color cast problem effectively. Then, on the one hand, we use the image decomposition to strengthen the detail part and obtain a detail enhanced image. On the other hand, we use the improved Retinex algorithm to strengthen the edge part and obtain an edge enhanced image. Finally, the detail enhanced image and the edge enhanced image are fused based on the non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST) to obtain the final enhanced underwater image. The results show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods about underwater image enhancement in terms of PCQI, UCIQE, UIQM and IE. By scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm, we calculate the number of feature matching points of the input image and the enhanced image, and our proposed method achieves the best experimental results. The source code of our proposed algorithm is available at: https://github.com/lin9393/ underwater-image-enhance.