Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Removing Light Source Color and Dehazing

Abstract

Typical underwater images exhibit poor visibility because of light scattering and absorption in turbid water. To resolve the ill-posed problem, a novel underwater image enhancement method based on Removing Light Source Color and Dehazing(RLSCD) is proposed. Scene depth, which is assumed strongly correlated with attenuations, is often ignored in most of the previous methods. A new scene depth estimation, which takes the attenuations of the different light conditions into account, is first presented. Additionally, the background light is estimated based on gray open operation and scene depth to avoid that the pixels in the white objects and artificial lighting regions may be wrongly estimated as the background light. With the estimated background light and transmission map, the dehazed image is achievable. Moreover, the theoretical analysis of the Lambertian Model indicates that the disturbance of the light source color in dehazed image can be estimated, this phenomenon enables us to correct color distortion and light overcompensation by removing the disturbance. Experimental results demonstrate the RLSCD method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of relatively genuine color, increased contrast, and brightness.

Keywords

• Light source color
• Lambertian model
• underwater image enhancement
• gray open