Underwater Image Restoration Using Color-Line Model

Underwater images typically suffer from low visibility and severe colorcast due to scattering and absorption. In this letter, a novel method is proposed to handle the scattering and absorption problems of light with different wavelengths based on the color-line model. We filter out image patches that exhibit the characteristics of the color-line prior and recover the color line of the patches. Then, the local transmission for each patch is estimated based on the offsets of the color lines along the background-light vector from the origin. We also develop an optimization function to derive the local transmission and to obtain the solution in the underwater environment. Experimental results are presented to show that the proposed method can produce high-quality underwater images with relatively genuine colors, natural appearance, and improved contrast and visibility.