Underwater image processing is essential to meet sustainable development goals. Underwater images are susceptible to colour loss, blurriness and are hazy in nature due to presence of suspended particles. Backscattering leads to haze content in image whereas absorption causes colour distortion. Due to scattering, absorption effects and varying wavelength of different colours, there is a problem of poor visibility, non-uniform illumination and colour fading. That’s why, for real time applications, underwater images demand high level colour correction and dehazing to ensure feature extraction, visibility enhancement, edge contrast improvement and preservation of image characteristics. Requirement is to design suitable underwater image processing technique that adapts according to perceived environment with different noise levels and non-uniform illumination. Algorithm should be efficient and possess higher functionality to enhance real-world ocean environment images.