Single Underwater Image Enhancement by Attenuation Map Guided Color Correction and Detail Preserved Dehazing

Abstract The attenuation (sum of absorption and scattering), which caused by the dense and non-uniform medium, generally leads to problems of color degradation and detail loss in underwater imaging. To address these problems, we propose a systematic underwater image enhancement method, which includes an attenuation map guided underwater image color correction approach and a detail preserved dehazing approach. The color correction approach fully considers the main causes of color degradation in underwater imaging, namely wavelength-dependent attenuation of different colors. According to the attenuation map of each color channel, a piece-wise linear transform is used to process the information of each color channel. Then, the detail preserved dehazing approach based on multi-scale decomposition is proposed to compensate for the lost details while eliminating the effects of haze. Especially, an adaptive Maximum Intensity Prior (MIP) measurement based on maximum attenuation identification is proposed to estimate transmission of the medium. Experiments on a variety types of degraded underwater images have proven that our proposed method can produce accurate results with vivid color and fine details, even better than other state-of-the-art underwater image dehazing methods.