Underwater image dehazing using joint trilateral filter

•We explored and successfully implemented an effectiveness minimum red color channel shallow water dehazing algorithm.•Joint trilateral filter is proposed.•Underwater absorption and scattering effects are corrected well.

This paper describes a novel method to enhance underwater images by image dehazing. Scattering and color change are two major problems of distortion for underwater imaging. Scattering is caused by large suspended particles, such as turbid water which contains abundant particles. Color change or color distortion corresponds to the varying degrees of attenuation encountered by light traveling in the water with different wavelengths, rendering ambient underwater environments dominated by a bluish tone. Our key contributions are proposed a new underwater model to compensate the attenuation discrepancy along the propagation path, and proposed a fast joint trigonometric filtering dehazing algorithm. The enhanced images are characterized by reduced noised level, better exposedness of the dark regions, improved global contrast while the finest details and edges are enhanced significantly. In addition, our method is comparable to higher quality than the state-of-the-art methods by assuming in the latest image evaluation systems.