Adaptive Stretching Method for Underwater Image Color Correction

The physical properties of water lead to attenuation of light that travels through the water channel. The attenuation is dependent on the color spectrum wavelength, that results in low contrast and color cast in image acquisition. Several methods have been proposed to handle these problems, such as Linear Stretching, Histogram Equalization (HE) and their variants. Considering the advantages of HE and Linear Stretching, this paper presents a new Adaptive Linear Stretch method (ALS) which can effciently improve the subjective impression of the traditional Linear Stretching and keep the computational cost low at the same time. To achieve adaptability, the adaptable threshold is deduced from the histogram of image. Performance analysis reveals that the proposed method significantly enhances the image contrast, reduces the color cast and meanwhile, keeps the computational consumption low.