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An effective underwater image enhancement based on the fusion of CLAHE and image constancy sharpening technique

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Abstract

The non-uniform illumination in underwater causes degradation of images as when light propagates through water, it gets scattered and absorbed due to various factors. The captured underwater images are mainly suffer from color distortion, color cast, low contrast, poor illumination, and blurred details due to the optical properties of water. Underwater image enhancement plays a preprocessing stage for high-level vision tasks. Therefore, to restore the degraded image and for visual enhancement, we proposed a fusion method for an effective output. This method generates two versions of color-corrected input image and one is given for contrast limited adaptive brightness preservance histogram equalization(CLABPHE) and the other for uniform illuminated sharpened image. The two are fused using their weight maps: Luminance weight map, and Saliency detection weight map, and they are normalized and then multi-layered fused using Laplacian pyramid-based decomposition to get an enhanced output image. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the proposed method works effectively for several datasets. The qualitative evaluation shows our method is better than the other algorithms compared.

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Data Availability

No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Ministry of Minority Affairs(MoMA), Government of India for providing financial support through the Maulana Azad National Fellowship Scheme(MANF) to carry out this research work. The authors would also like to acknowledge Department of Science and Technology( DST) for rendering infrastructural support through the Fund for Improvement of S &T Infrastructure(FIST) project, Government of India and also the support provided by the Government Model Engineering College Ernakulam, Kerala, India and APJ AbdulKalam Technological University, Kerala, India for carrying out this work.

Funding

The presented work was supported by the Ministry of Minority Affairs(MoMA)- Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF)(no. F.82-87/2019 (SA III)), Government of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics, Govt Model Engineering College - APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University, Kochi, 682021, Kerala, India

    Hena Prince & Binesh T

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  1. Hena Prince
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  2. Binesh T
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Contributions

All authors have contributed to the analysis studies and implementations. Hena Prince was involved in design, qualitative, and quantitative analysis and she also wrote the first draft of the manuscript.All authors including Binesh T commented on earlier versions of the manuscript and also approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hena Prince.

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The study does not contain any elements with human participation/animals performed by any of the authors.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Communicated by: H. Babaie.

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Prince, H., T, B. An effective underwater image enhancement based on the fusion of CLAHE and image constancy sharpening technique. Earth Sci Inform 17, 1359–1372 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-024-01226-5

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