An Underwater Image Vision Enhancement Algorithm Based on Contour Bougie Morphology

Underwater images require further enhancement to improve the image qualities caused by medium scattering and light absorption. Based on Contour Bougie (CB) morphology, we propose a new enhancement method to enhance the scene contours and improve the visibility of images captured underwater. Two structuring elements with different sizes are considered as the roving windows. Multiple morphological operations are designed for highlighting the rich details on the origin images. The enhanced images are normalized and stretched to improve the white balance of RGB channels. The comprehensive study of state-of-the-art algorithms is conducted to interpret the improvement of image quality by the proposed method. In addition, we use 890 raw underwater degraded images as the testing data. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations of these data demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better visible contrast for highlighting the details of the undersea creatures. The comparison with different underwater scenes proves that the proposed method improves the color balances of the degraded images.