A hybrid method for underwater image correction

Underwater images surfer from serious color deviation and blurring due to the effects of light absorption and scattering. In this letter, a hybrid method, which includes color correction and underwater image dehazing, is proposed to improve the visual quality of degraded underwater images. Firstly, an efficient color correction algorithm is applied to remove color casts of underwater images. Then, underwater image dehazing method is proposed to improve the visibility of underwater images, which includes a global background light estimation algorithm specialized for underwater images and a medium transmission estimation algorithm based on the combination a regression model with the characteristics of light traveling in water medium. Since there is no available dataset in this relatively new research area, a dataset which includes 45 underwater images with a wide variety of contents is collected. Subjective and objective performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves both color and visibility of degraded underwater images, and is comparable to and even outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.