Underwater Image Enhancement via Weighted Wavelet Visual Perception Fusion

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 34; no. 4; pp. 2469 - 2483
• Main Authors: Zhang, Weidong, Zhou, Ling, Zhuang, Peixian, Li, Guohou, Pan, Xipeng, Zhao, Wenyi, Li, Chongyi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Attenuation; Color; color correction; contrast enhancement; Degradation; Distortion; Electromagnetic absorption; Entropy (Information theory); Image color analysis; Image contrast; Image enhancement; Image quality; Image restoration; light scattering; Photodegradation; Underwater; Underwater image enhancement; underwater imaging; Visual perception
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2023.3299314

Underwater images typically suffer from various quality degradation issues due to the scattering and absorption of light, but these degraded-quality underwater images are unbeneficial for analysis and applications. To effectively solve these quality degradation issues, an underwater image enhancement method via weighted wavelet visual perception fusion is introduced, called WWPF. Concretely, we first present an attenuation-map-guided color correction strategy to correct the color distortion of an underwater image. Subsequently, we employ the maximum information entropy optimized global contrast strategy to the color-corrected image to obtain a global contrast-enhanced image. Meanwhile, we apply a fast integration optimized local contrast strategy to the color-corrected image to get a local contrast-enhanced image. To exploit the complementary of the global contrast-enhanced image and the local contrast-enhanced image, we introduce a weighted wavelet visual perception fusion strategy to obtain a high-quality underwater image by fusing the high-frequency and low-frequency components of images at different scales. Our extensive experiments on three benchmarks validate that our WWPF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in qualitative and quantitative. Besides, the underwater images processed by our WWPF also benefit practical underwater applications. The code is available https://github.com/Li-Chongyi/WWPF_code .