Underwater Image Haze Removal and Color Correction with an Underwater-ready Dark Channel Prior
This work addresses the challenge of reliable image enhancement for underwater operations, which is incremental as it builds upon existing adaptations of the Dark Channel Prior.
The paper tackled the problem of underwater image degradation due to light attenuation and scattering by proposing a modified Dark Channel Prior method for haze removal and color correction, showing that it outperforms competing solutions and demonstrating robustness on real-life data from the DexROV project.
Underwater images suffer from extremely unfavourable conditions. Light is heavily attenuated and scattered. Attenuation creates change in hue, scattering causes so called veiling light. General state of the art methods for enhancing image quality are either unreliable or cannot be easily used in underwater operations. On the other hand there is a well known method for haze removal in air, called Dark Channel Prior. Even though there are known adaptations of this method to underwater applications, they do not always work correctly. This work elaborates and improves upon the initial concept presented in [1]. A modification to the Dark Channel Prior is proposed that allows for an easy application to underwater images. It is also shown that our method outperforms competing solutions based on the Dark Channel Prior. Experiments on real-life data collected within the DexROV project are also presented, showing the robustness and high performance of the proposed algorithm.