Abstract
Underwater images suffer from color cast and low visibility caused by the medium scattering and absorption, which will reduce the use of valuable information from the image. In this paper, we propose a novel method which includes four stages of pixel intensity center regionalization, global equalization of histogram, local equalization of histogram and multi-scale fusion. Additionally, this method uses a pixel intensity center regionalization strategy to perform centralization of the image histogram on the overall image. Global equalization of histogram is employed to correct color of the image according to the characteristics of each channel. Local equalization of dual-interval histogram based on average of peak and mean values is used to improve contrast of the image according to the characteristics of each channel. Dual-image multi-scale fusion to integrate the contrast, saliency and exposure weight maps of the color corrected and contrast enhanced images. Experiments on variety types of degraded underwater images show that the proposed method produces better output results in both qualitative and quantitative analysis, thus, the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
Highlights
In recent years, with the continuous growth of population and the shortage of resources, people have turned their attention to the development and utilization of the ocean world with rich mineral resources
As illustrated in Figure 2, the proposed GLHDF method consists of four stages, namely, (1) Pixel intensity center regionalization (PICR), (ii) Global Equalization of Histogram (GEH), (iii) Local Equalization of Histogram (LEH), and (iv) Dual-image multi-scale fusion (DIMCF)
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS The performance of the proposed GLHDF method is compared with several state-of-the-art methods namely red channel [14], hybrid-based [17], underwater image restoration based on image blurriness and light absorption (UIBLA) [18], generalization of the dark channel prior for single image restoration (GDCP) [19], Retinex-based [31], fusion-based [35] and two-step-based [41]
Summary
With the continuous growth of population and the shortage of resources, people have turned their attention to the development and utilization of the ocean world with rich mineral resources. The water medium and the suspended particles have absorption and scattering effect on light when traveling in water [1]–[3]. Absorption causes color distortion of underwater images, while scattering results in low visibility of underwater images. The study of underwater sharpening technology is of great significance for the exploration and utilization of underwater resources [4]–[6]. To improve the quality of underwater degraded images, underwater sharpening methods include underwater image
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