Color correction and adaptive contrast enhancement for underwater image enhancement

Abstract To address the color cast and low contrast of underwater images, we propose a color correction and adaptive contrast enhancement algorithm for underwater image enhancement. In our work, we first design the dedicated fractions to compensate the lower color channels, which are calculated by considering the ratio of the differences between the upper and lower color channels to the lower color channels. Subsequently, an adaptive contrast enhancement algorithm is applied to each color channel is proposed to produce the background-stretched and foreground-stretched images, the combination of these two images significantly improves the contrast of the output image. Finally, a unsharp masking technique is applied to sharpen the overall image. Experiments on the standard underwater image enhancement benchmark dataset have proven that our algorithm can output high-quality images, while the performer of our algorithm is at least 5% better than the second-best in the average of all metric scores.