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Underwater images contrast enhancement and its challenges: a survey

  • 1158T: Role of Computer Vision in Smart Cities: Applications and Research Challenges
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Abstract

Exploration of the deep sea and ocean in the marine industry has continued to gain interest in recent years. To get the detailed imaging of deep sea layers, marine vessels and robots are fitted with advanced imaging technologies. There are certain factors like water properties and impurities that affect the quality of the photographs captured by the underwater imaging devices. As sea water absorbs colors, so processing of sea imaging data becomes more challenging. Water light attenuation is a phenomenon that is caused by the absorbance and scattering factors. Certain studies showed that the existence of certain intrinsic shortcomings are attributed to the appearance of objects and ambient noise in underwater images. As a result, it is difficult in a real-time system to distinguish objects from their surroundings in these images. We measures the algorithms performance with respect to various aspects, effect of the hardware and software parts for underwater images and critical review of different underwater image enhancement algorithms. First, we describe some well-known techniques of spatial and frequency domains. Then, we list the existing quantitative measurements which are required to measure the quality of the enhanced image. Finally, the performance of various up-to-date existing methods is compared based on the outcomes of standard quantitative measurements, and factors such as requirements/suitability, and technical aspects, are included. Furthermore, a variety of image databases used for image contrast enhancement is discussed in detail. This study expands the scope for other researchers to understand the important characteristics of different underwater image contrast enhancement methods, and also provides future research directions.

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The authors confirm that the data generated or analyzed and supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.

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Funding

The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this work through the research group under project RG-1441-379.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Applied Computer Science, King Saud University, (Almuzahmiyah Campus), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Omar Almutiry, Awais Mahmood & Habib Dhahri

  2. Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Attock Campus, Attock, Pakistan

    Khalid Iqbal

  3. Department of Software Engineering, Foundation University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Shariq Hussain

Authors
  1. Omar Almutiry
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  2. Khalid Iqbal
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  3. Shariq Hussain
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  4. Awais Mahmood
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  5. Habib Dhahri
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Contributions

It is acknowledged that all the co-authors have made a significant contribution to conceptualization, data analysis, experimentations, scientific discussions, preparation of the original draft, revision, and organization of the paper.

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Correspondence to Shariq Hussain.

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Almutiry, O., Iqbal, K., Hussain, S. et al. Underwater images contrast enhancement and its challenges: a survey. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 15125–15150 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10626-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10626-4

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