Improvement of underwater colour correction using standard deviation ratio

This Letter presents a simple and new colour correction algorithm for the underwater image. The proposed method corrects the pixels of the weak colour channel based on the ratio of the standard deviation of the weak colour channel to that of the green channel. The corrected image based on the proposed colour balanced algorithm barely produces a reddish artefact and can be applied directly to the existing dehazing approaches without any processing. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves good colour correction performance, as well as reasonable underwater image enhancement when employed with the existing dehazing methods.