Low-Light Underwater Image Enhancement for Deep-Sea Tripod

To monitor the sedimentary process and morphological evolution in the South China Sea, free-ascending deep-sea tripod (FDT) has been developed. This FDT was equipped with a deep-sea camera and landed on the sea floor at a depth of 2100 m. Although the FDT was equipped with an artificial light, the battery capacity limited the duration and intensity of light. Therefore, enhancing such low-illumination images to obtain clear visual effects is an important advancement for analyzing the geological evolution process. In this paper, an adaptive bright-color channel-based low-light underwater image-enhancement method and a denoising method are proposed to enhance such images and remove noise and artifacts. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art methods.