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Underwater image enhancement based on color-line model and color correction

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Abstract

Underwater images suffer from issues such as haze and color distortion caused by complex environmental factors. An underwater image enhancement method is introduced, which is based on color-line model and color correction. The accuracy of estimating background light and transmission is key for underwater image enhancement. Firstly, the background light candidate regions are estimated using image blocking and minimum unary gray entropy. The background light is estimated by separating the background using a threshold formula in the candidate regions. Then, a restarted accelerated convex optimization method is developed to estimate transmission, which is based on the minimum optimization problem between the color-line and the background light. The dehazed image is obtained using the simplified imaging model. Finally, the color correction technique is employed to enhance the visual quality of the dehazed images. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through experiments in four aspects, including qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, color accuracy analysis and application analysis.

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Funding

This work was partially supported by Hebei Natural Science Foundation (D2024209006), Science Research Project of Hebei Education Department (QN2024147).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Electrical Engineering, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, 063210, China

    Xiuman Liang, Zhigang Zhao, Haifeng Yu, Zhendong Liu & Ruicheng Zhang

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  1. Xiuman Liang
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  2. Zhigang Zhao
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  3. Haifeng Yu
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  4. Zhendong Liu
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  5. Ruicheng Zhang
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Contributions

All authors have made contributions to this work. Individual contributions are as follows: Xiuman Liang and Zhigang Zhao wrote the main manuscript text and Haifeng Yu, Zhendong Liu and Ruicheng Zhang prepared figures and tables. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Haifeng Yu.

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Liang, X., Zhao, Z., Yu, H. et al. Underwater image enhancement based on color-line model and color correction. SIViP 19, 279 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-025-03874-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-025-03874-6

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