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Single underwater image enhancement based on the reconstruction from gradients

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Abstract

Since the light is absorbed, reflected and scattered during the transmission process, underwater images are degraded suffering from color casts and low contrast. In the paper, an effective enhancement method for single underwater image is proposed based on the reconstruction technique from gradients. The method firstly corrects color by a simple and effective white-balancing approach after the compensation of red attenuation. And then an improved DCP method is used to estimate the transmission indicating the absorption and reflection of light, based on a combination filter because of edge preservation and high efficiency. Last, the enhanced gradients are obtained based on the estimated transmission, and details enhancement is accomplished by image reconstruction from the enhanced gradients on the luminance layer in Lab color space. Experimental results show that our method achieves better visual results in qualitative and quantitative evaluation, which can effectively recover the color and improve the image contrast even in very dense regions. Additionally, running time shows that our method is competitive and can be applied for real-time tasks.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation (2020JJ5218), by the Scientific Research Fund of Education Department of Hunan Province (18B345), by the Engineering Research Center on 3D Reconstruction and Intelligent Application Technology of Hunan Province (2019-430602-73-03-006049).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Communication Engineering, Hunan Institute of Science and Technology, 414006, Yueyang, China

    Wujing Li, Ximing Yang, Yuze Liu & Xianfeng Ou

  2. Machine Vision & Artificial Intelligence Research Center, Hunan Institute of Science and Technology, 414006, Yueyang, China

    Wujing Li, Ximing Yang, Yuze Liu & Xianfeng Ou

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  1. Wujing Li
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  2. Ximing Yang
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  3. Yuze Liu
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  4. Xianfeng Ou
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Correspondence to Yuze Liu.

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Li, W., Yang, X., Liu, Y. et al. Single underwater image enhancement based on the reconstruction from gradients. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 16973–16983 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-14158-3

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