Underwater Image Enhancement Using Successive Color Correction and Superpixel Dark Channel Prior

Underwater images generally suffer from quality degradations, such as low contrast, color cast, blurring, and hazy effect due to light absorption and scattering in the water medium. In applying these images to various vision tasks, single image-based underwater image enhancement has been challenging. Thus, numerous efforts have been made in the field of underwater image restoration. In this paper, we propose a successive color correction method with a minimal reddish artifact and a superpixel-based restoration using a color-balanced underwater image. The proposed successive color correction method comprises an effective underwater white balance based on the standard deviation ratio, followed by a new image normalization. The corrected image based on this color balance algorithm barely produces a reddish artifact. The superpixel-based dark channel prior is exploited to enhance the color-corrected underwater image. We introduce an image-adaptive weight factor using the mean of backscatter lights to estimate the transmission map. We perform intensive experiments for various underwater images and compare the performance of the proposed method with those of 10 state-of-the-art underwater image-enhancement methods. The simulation results show that the proposed enhancement scheme outperforms the existing approaches in terms of both subjective and objective quality.