Two-stage underwater image restoration based on a physical model

Abstract

Underwater images are blurred due to light scattering and absorption. Image restoration is therefore important in many underwater research and practical tasks. In this paper, we propose an effective two-stage method to restore underwater scene images. Based on an underwater light propagation model, we first remove backscatter by fitting a binary quadratic function. Then we eliminate the forward scattering and non-uniform lighting attenuation using blue-green dark channel prior. The proposed method requires no additional calibration and we show its effectiveness and robustness by restoring images captured under various underwater scenes.