Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Dehazing and Color Correction

Abstract

Clear and clean underwater images can provide valuable information, which are crucial for developing, exploring, and protecting the underwater resources. However, the raw underwater image seldom fulfills the requirements concerning the underwater research due to the serious image degradation. To enhance single underwater image, we propose an effective and new method combined on the dehazing and color correction algorithm. First, we obtain the dehazed image by a fusion dehazing method calculated on the difference between maximum green-blue dark channels and maximum red dark channel, and the top 0:1% bright pixels in green-blue dark channels. Second, we obtain the enhanced image via the color restoration method corresponding to the human visual system. Finally, we use an efficient and simple weight fusion strategy to incorporate the dehazed image and the enhanced image for yielding the final high quality underwater image. Subjective assessment demonstrates that our method can remove haze, correct color cast, improve image brightness, and preserve image naturalness. The enhanced results obtain the highest values in terms of entropy, average gradient, UCIQE, UIQM, and CCF, which is superior to several existing underwater enhancement methods. Moreover, our method can improve other degraded image quality, such as low-light image and haze image, and can benefit the application tests, such as key points matching and edge detection.