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Underwater image enhancement based on adaptive color correction and multi-scale fusion

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Abstract

In actual captured underwater images, serious color distortion, detail loss and limited visibility are common issues due to the combined influence of water medium scattering and absorption. To solve these problems, an underwater image enhancement method based on adaptive color correction and multi-scale fusion is proposed, which does not rely on any specific equipment or auxiliary information. According to the attenuation degree of underwater images, an adaptive color correction method of piecewise linear transformation is used to address the color distortion. Then, the color-corrected image is converted from RGB to CIE-Lab color space, and the luminance channel L is applied to the updated logarithmic image processing (LIP) model alone to improve contrast. The final enhanced image is created by fusing the color-corrected image with the contrast-improved image using a multi-scale fusion technique based on contrast, saliency, and saturation. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation results demonstrate that compared with some state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method can produce better visual quality and have higher average values in underwater image quality evaluation such as AG, IE, PCQI, UIQM and UCIQE.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China No. 62103072, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation No. 2021M690502 and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities No. 3132021242.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dalian Maritime University, DaLian, China

    Jinyu Shi, Shanshan Yu, Huanan Li, Xiuguo Zhang & Changxin Liu

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  1. Jinyu Shi
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Shi, J., Yu, S., Li, H. et al. Underwater image enhancement based on adaptive color correction and multi-scale fusion. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 12535–12559 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15652-y

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