Title: Adaptive histogram fusion-based colour restoration and enhancement for underwater images

Authors: Jingchun Zhou; Dehuan Zhang; Weishi Zhang

Addresses: College of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, No. 1, Linghai Road, Dalian, 116026, China ' College of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, No. 1, Linghai Road, Dalian, 116026, China ' College of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, No. 1, Linghai Road, Dalian, 116026, China

Abstract: Underwater image restoration is crucial for marine exploration, underwater archaeology and seafloor geological investigation. However, due to the complex underwater environment, the image obtained underwater often has problems with colour deviation and lack of details. To improve the quality and the visual effect of underwater images, we propose an adaptive histogram fusion-based colour restoration and enhancement method for underwater images. First, the proposed method restores the colour by pixel value adjusting in a channel and b channel according to colour distortion. Then the histogram is used in the H channel of the underwater source image to improve the colour hue. To make the enhanced result more in line with visual observation, the edge reserving-based method is used to enhance the details of colour restoration results. Experimental results demonstrate that our results are effective in subjective and objective evaluations, and superior to several existing methods.

Keywords: underwater images enhancement; colour restoration; image fusion; adaptive histogram equalisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2021.112848

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2021 Vol.16 No.1, pp.49 - 59

Received: 01 Jun 2020
Accepted: 23 Jun 2020
Published online: 07 Feb 2021 *

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