A Review on the Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement Methods

Abstract

Light scattering, as well as light absorption in the water, often cause underwater images to be hazy, poorly contrasted, and dominated by either green or blue colour cast. In this paper, we review some of the state-of-the-art approaches in which specifically designed to enhance the quality of the acquired images. These approaches are able to eliminate the color cast and haziness on the images as well as to improve the image colourfulness and contrast. The characteristics of each of the developed approaches are highlighted, and their performances are evaluated both subjectively and objectively by the quality assessment methods.

Keywords

• colour cast
• image enhancement
• underwater image processing
• image restoration