Underwater image enhancement by dark channel prior

Abstract

Light scattering and color change are two main problems in underwater images. Due to light scattering, incident light gets reflected and deflected multiple times by particles present in the water. This degrades the visibility and contrast of the underwater image. Dark channel prior is method used for removing the haze present in the underwater image. It is based on a key observation - most local patches in haze-free underwater images contain some pixels which have very low intensities in at least one color channel. Using this prior with the haze imaging color model estimates the thickness of the haze and recover a high quality haze-free image. This method does not require images with different exposure values, and is entirely based on the attenuation experienced by point across multiple frames. In this paper underwater image enhancement using Dark channel Prior is attempted. Results shows that the performance of this method is better compared to image enhancement using histogram equalization.