Transmission Estimation in Underwater Single Images

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology to estimate the transmission in underwater environments which consists on an adaptation of the Dark Channel Prior (DCP), a statistical prior based on properties of images obtained in outdoor natural scenes. Our methodology, called Underwater DCP (UDCP), basically considers that the blue and green color channels are the underwater visual information source, which enables a significant improvement over existing methods based in DCP. This is shown through a comparative study with state of the art techniques, we present a detailed analysis of our technique which shows its applicability and limitations in images acquired from real and simulated scenes.