Underwater Image Dehazing Using The Color Space Dimensionality Reduction Prior

Abstract

Underwater images suffer from low visibility caused by absorption and scattering, which leads to haze and some further limitations. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel dehaze method based on a universal observation that all pixels of most underwater images tend to distribute nearby a specific plane in RGB space. This observation is named the color space dimensionality reduction prior. By projecting all pixels to this plane, namely the UV color space, the color distribution of these pixels can be reduced from the three-dimensional space (RGB space) to a new two-dimensional space (UV space) without causing any excessive color shift. By carefully setting the haze-free boundary in UV space, we can obtain the image transmission and finally produce an excellent dehazed image. Experimental results show that our method has competitive results compared with mainstream underwater single image dehazing methods.