Single underwater image restoration based on adaptive color correction and adaptive transmission fusion

When light propagates through water, there will be absorption and scattering. Due to this reason, underwater images suffer from color distortion, contrast loss, and detail blurriness. In order to improve the quality of underwater images, an underwater image restoration method based on adaptive color correction and adaptive transmission fusion strategy is proposed. First, an adaptive color correction algorithm is proposed to compensate the color attenuation. Second, based on the image blurriness, the underwater red channel prior (RCP) and the maximum RCP, an adaptive transmission fusion strategy is designed to estimate the transmission map, which can benefit from each other and collaboratively transmit the transmission accurately. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively remove color cast and improve contrast and visibility, especially for underwater images with high turbidity or artificial light sources. (C) 2020 SPIE and IS&T