A Two-Step Approach for Underwater Image Enhancement
Donghui Wei, Wanchun Chen, Xiaogang Chen · 2017 International Conference on Computer Systems, Electronics and Control (ICCSEC) · 2017
Underwater photography is important for the works of exploring underwater scenes. Comparing with normal camera images, the underwater images usually have low brightness-contrast and with low visual quality. This paper proposes a new method to improve the underwater image visual quality by using a two-step approach. Firstly, a transmission map based enhancement is applied to increase the image global contrast, similar to the image defog algorithm. Secondly, image details are extracted and the local contrast is improved by applying edge-preserving filter. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed two-step approach can significantly improve the visual quality of underwater images.