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Underwater image enhancement using multiscale decomposition and gamma correction

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Abstract

Underwater image enhancement has been attracting much attention due to its significance in marine engineering and aquatic robotics. Captured underwater images usually suffer from contrast degradation, low illumination, color cast, and noise. Many underwater image enhancement and restoration algorithms have been developed but are not able to solve all these problems. In this paper, a new single image retinex algorithm using gamma correction is proposed. Here the input image is decomposed into illumination and Reflectance. Illumination contains brightness variation, and Reflectance preserves the details information. Then Reflectance decomposed into multiple layers, which carried out gamma correction and contrast enhancement. Whereas illumination carried out brightness adjustment. Finally, these layers are combined to obtain an enhanced image. The proposed method produces high-quality enhanced images compared to the existing state-of-art method such as the Hue-preserving-based approach for underwater color image enhancement, Underwater image processing using a hybrid technique, and Underwater dark channel before using a guided image filter. The proposed method is tested for the underwater image enhancement benchmark data set and compared with the existing state-of-art method. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of seven parameters such as measure of enhancement (EME), discrete entropy (DE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Structure similarity index measure (SSIM), underwater color image quality evaluation (UCIQE), underwater image quality measure (UIQM), and patch-based contrast quality index (PCQI) for underwater images. Six parameters of the proposed method performed better compared to an existing method. The visual appearance of the output image of the proposed method has a very high quality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India

    Amarendra Kumar Mishra, Mahipal Singh Choudhry & Manjeet Kumar

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  1. Amarendra Kumar Mishra
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  2. Mahipal Singh Choudhry
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Mishra, A.K., Choudhry, M.S. & Kumar, M. Underwater image enhancement using multiscale decomposition and gamma correction. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 15715–15733 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-14008-2

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