Underwater Image Quality Improvement via Color, Detail, and Contrast Restoration

Due to the complex imaging mechanism, underwater images often suffer from multiple degradation issues, such as color cast, blurry detail, and low contrast, which affect the extraction of valuable information. To deal with these degradation issues, a simple yet effective underwater image quality improvement method based on color, detail and contrast restoration (CDCR) is developed, which consists of three key modules: a well-preserved finding-driven color balance module (CBM), a linear saturation transformation-based discriminant function-based detail restoration module (DRM), and a transmission minimization-oriented contrast restoration module (CRM). First, the CBM explores a well-preserved channel finding and employs a channel compensation strategy to balance the color differences among three color channels. Second, the DRM uses a piecewise underwater image saturation estimation strategy, which takes the various spectral properties of water into account and designs an additional linear saturation transformation-based discriminant function to prevent the transmission from being under-estimated. At last, the CRM estimates a global backscatter light based on transmission minimization and further improves the contrast by locally removing the backscatter light of the base layer. Our restored image is appealing in its natural color, fine details, and high contrast. Extensive experiments on three underwater image enhancement datasets show that our CDCR achieves better results than state-of-the-art methods, i.e., compared with the second-best method, the average PCQI and UIQM values of our method increase by 5.7% and 0.2%, and the average Blur and DFAD values of our method decrease by 8.0% and 5.3%. Meanwhile, experiments further suggest that the rate of new visible edges and the quality of contrast restoration of our CDCR at least increase by 7.7% and 51.2% in most tested sandstorm and foggy images, respectively, which demonstrates that our method has a good generalization capability for sandstorm and foggy image restoration.