Fusion based approach for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater images are affected by factors such as haze, insufficient light, high concentration of various impurities which leads to a blue/green tinge, and blurriness. Majority of image enhancement techniques have been developed for atmospheric images but comparatively, very few techniques have been proposed for underwater image enhancement. This paper proposes a fusion algorithm which can enhance underwater images shot under various environmental conditions. This method uses Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR) to obtain an image with improved color retention and better dynamic range. Then, the image blur is removed by using Dark Channel Prior (DCP). The results show that the proposed method gives 10% better Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) for the fusion-based algorithm.