Enhancing underwater image via color correction and Bi-interval contrast enhancement

Underwater captured images often suffer from color cast and low visibility due to light is scattered and absorbed while it traveling in water. In this paper, we proposed a novel method of color correction and Biinterval contrast enhancement to improve the quality of underwater images. Firstly, a simple and effective color correction method based on sub-interval linear transformation is employed to address color distortion. Then, a Gaussian low-pass filter is applied to the L channel to decompose the lowand high-frequency components. Finally, the lowand high-frequency components are enhanced by Bi-interval histogram based on optimal equalization threshold strategy and S-shaped function to enhancement image contrast and highlight image details. Inspired by the multi-scale fusion, we employed a simple linear fusion to integrate the enhanced high and low-frequency components. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed method outputs high-quality underwater images with qualitative and quantitative evaluation well.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a novel method for improving the quality of underwater images, involving color correction, decomposing lowand high-frequency components, Bi-interval histogram contrast enhancement, as well as multi-scale fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outputs high-quality underwater images with well qualitative and quantitative evaluation.