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Underwater image restoration based on exponentiated mean local variance and extrinsic prior

  • 1193: Intelligent Processing of Multimedia Signals
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Abstract

Due to the absorption and scattering of light when it travels in water, underwater imaging has various problems, such as color distortion and low contrast. In general, it is difficult to accurately estimate the transmission map of underwater image during the restoration process, while it is easy to introduce external noise. In view of the above two problems, firstly, we estimate the original transmission map of underwater images by the intrinsic boundary constraint based on the scene radiance. Then, we develop a novel variational framework combined with the exponentiated mean local variance and extrinsic prior of transmission map for keeping the image edge and removing noise. Finally, we make quantitative and qualitative analyses of the restored underwater images. The experiments demonstrate that the method proposed in this paper has certain advantages compared with other methods. In quantitative comparison, our proposed method has higher image quality evaluation score. For qualitative analysis, the images restored using our method not only have natural colors and good contrast, but the details of the images are also well maintained.

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Change history

  • 17 February 2022

    The original version of this paper was updated to present the correct Algorithm and authors' photos.

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Funding

This work was supported by Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province KYCX20_0722.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, No. 66 Xin Mofan Road, Nanjing, 210003, People’s Republic of China

    Shiwen Li, Feng Liu & Jian Wei

  2. School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Heyuan Polytechnic, University Town of East Ring Road, Yuancheng District, Heyuan, 517000, People’s Republic of China

    Shiwen Li

  3. Jiangsu Key Lab of Image Processing and Image Communications, No. 66 Xin Mofan Road, Nanjing, 210003, People’s Republic of China

    Feng Liu & Jian Wei

Authors
  1. Shiwen Li
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  2. Feng Liu
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  3. Jian Wei
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Correspondence to Feng Liu.

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This work was supproted by Postgraduate Research & Practice Inovation Program of Jiangsu Province KYCX20_0722.

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Li, S., Liu, F. & Wei, J. Underwater image restoration based on exponentiated mean local variance and extrinsic prior. Multimed Tools Appl 81, 4935–4960 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-11269-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-11269-1

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