Underwater Image Enhancement Using White Balance, USM and CLHE

Enhancement of the underwater images is essential because of the poor illumination, dispersion and scattering losses of the environment. This paper proposes a luminosity conserving and contrast enhancing method for enhancement of the underwater images. In the proposed method, initially, the images are subjected to white balance in order to remove the unwanted colour cast. A modified approach adopted from Gray World algorithm is used for colour correction. The processed image is subsequently subjected to unsharp masking and contrast limited histogram equalization to ensure the enhancement of edges and contrast respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can enhance the images.