Real-Time Underwater Image Contrast Enhancement Through Guided Filtering

Absorption, scattering, and color distortion are three major issues in underwater optical imaging. In this paper, we propose a novel underwater imaging model that compensates for the attenuation discrepancy along the propagation path. In addition, we develop a fast weighted guided filtering algorithm for enhancing underwater optical transmission map. The final enhanced images are characterized by a reduced noised level, better exposure in dark regions, and improved global contrast, by which the finest details and edges are enhanced significantly. Our experiments show that with the use of our proposed algorithm, the peak signal-to-noise ratio is improved by at least 2 dB compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The structural similarity index is improved by about 0.01.

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