Underwater image enhancement utilizing adaptive color correction and model conversion for dehazing

Abstract

Underwater imaging is typically affected by absorption and scattering, which can lead to color distortion and image blurring. However, no universal color constancy algorithm for correcting underwater images exists due to the wide variation in underwater scenes. Furthermore, methods based on learning to improve underwater image quality often suffer from a lack of ground truth, which can compromise the validity and authenticity of restored images. In this study, we propose an adaptive underwater image enhancement technique that corrects image color and reduces haze using a valid dataset with ground truth. Specifically, we first use hue channel statistics from underwater images to build a dataset of color-corrected images from different underwater scenes. We use this dataset to train an Unet-like network for adaptive color correction. After color correction, underwater images often exhibit characteristics similar to hazy terrestrial images. We refer to this phenomenon as “model conversion”. The hazy terrestrial images have corresponding ground truth. Therefore, we train a Transformer-like network with hazy terrestrial image datasets to remove haze in underwater images. Our method is more robust for different underwater scenes and elegantly solves the problem of lacking ground truth. A series of experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics.