Underwater Image Dehazing Based on Disparity Estimation and Color Constraint

For underwater image quality improvement, we regard image restoration as dehazing problem, and proposed a restoration method combining disparity map and color constraints. According to the dark channel prior model, image can be recovered through the estimation of background light and transmission. Considering the consistency of disparity map and depth information, the disparity map and dark channel are fused in the non-subsampled contour wave transform domain. Then the background light closer to true depth in RGB color space is estimated by the fused map with haze-lines theory. In consideration of the different attenuation characteristics of different wavelengths light in water, the transmission estimation is established according to the red-based attenuation coefficient ratio. It is benefit to improve the color distortions especially in the texture area. The experiment results show that the proposed underwater restoration image method can achieves better brightness and contrast enhancement, the image edge sharpness and color recovery.