Enhancement of Underwater Images with Retinex Transmission Map and Adaptive Color Correction

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 13; no. 3; p. 1973
• Main Authors: Chen, Erkang, Ye, Tian, Chen, Qianru, Huang, Bin, Hu, Yendo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2023
• Subjects: Color; color correction; Estimation; Experiments; Image contrast; Image enhancement; Image processing; Image quality; Inverse problems; Light; Low visibility; Methods; Quality assessment; Quality control; Radiation; transmission map estimation; Underwater; underwater image enhancement; White balancing
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app13031973

Underwater images often suffer from low contrast, low visibility, and color deviation. In this work, we propose a hybrid underwater enhancement method consisting of addressing an inverse problem with novel Retinex transmission map estimation and adaptive color correction. Retinex transmission map estimation does not rely on channel priors and aims to decouple from the unknown background light, thus avoiding error accumulation problem. To this end, global white balance is performed before estimating the transmission map using multi-scale Retinex. To further improve the enhancement performance, we design the adaptive color correction which cleverly chooses between two color correction procedures and prevents channel stretching imbalance. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons of our method and state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement methods demonstrate superiority of the proposed method. It achieves the best performance in terms of full-reference image quality assessment. In addition, it also achieves superior performance in the non-reference evaluation.