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Underwater image enhancement algorithm based on color correction and contrast enhancement

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Abstract

Due to the complex underwater environment and the selective absorption and scattering effect of water on light waves, underwater images often suffer from issues such as low contrast, color distortion, and blurred details. This paper presents a stable and effective algorithm for enhancing underwater images to address these challenges. Firstly, an improved color correction algorithm based on the gray world and minimum information loss is employed to remove the blue-green bias present in the images. Secondly, a contrast enhancement algorithm is based on the guided filter and wavelet decomposition to make the texture details of the image clearer. Then, the normalized weight map of the image is obtained to carry out multi-scale fusion. Finally, the fused image is applied to perform the multi-scale decomposition. The experimental results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can correct the image color deviation, improve the image contrast and enhance the image details.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Fundamental Research Program of Shanxi Province (Grant Numbers 20210302123019, 202103021224195, 202103021224212, 202103021223189, 20210302123031) and Shanxi Scholarship Council of China (Grant numbers 2020-104, 2021-108).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics, North University of China, Taiyuan, 030051, Shanxi, China

    Qianqian Xue, Hongping Hu, Yanping Bai, Rong Cheng, Peng Wang & Na Song

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  1. Qianqian Xue
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  2. Hongping Hu
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  3. Yanping Bai
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  5. Peng Wang
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Correspondence to Hongping Hu.

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Xue, Q., Hu, H., Bai, Y. et al. Underwater image enhancement algorithm based on color correction and contrast enhancement. Vis Comput (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-023-03117-0

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