Underwater image quality optimization: Researches, challenges, and future trends

Abstract

Underwater images serve as crucial mediums for conveying marine information. Nevertheless, due to the inherent complexity of the underwater environment, underwater images often suffer from various quality degradation phenomena such as color deviation, low contrast, and non-uniform illumination. These degraded underwater images fail to meet the requirements of underwater computer vision applications. Consequently, effective quality optimization of underwater images is of paramount research and analytical value. Based on whether they rely on underwater physical imaging models, underwater image quality optimization techniques can be categorized into underwater image enhancement and underwater image restoration methods. This paper provides a comprehensive review of underwater image enhancement and restoration algorithms, accompanied by a brief introduction to underwater imaging model. Then, we systematically analyze publicly available underwater image datasets and commonly-used quality assessment methodologies. Furthermore, extensive experimental comparisons are carried out to assess the performance of underwater image optimization algorithms and their practical impact on high-level vision tasks. Finally, the challenges and future development trends in this field are discussed. We hope that the efforts made in this paper will provide valuable references for future research and contribute to the innovative advancement of underwater image optimization.