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Underwater image enhancement by using transmission optimization and background light estimation via principal component analysis fusion

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Abstract

The optical properties of water exacerbate the problems that arise in underwater imaging, including low contrast, color cast, noise, and haze. Pre-processing techniques are required in order to extract relevant information from these images. To solve the above problem, a new underwater image enhancement by using transmission optimization and background light estimation via Principal component analysis (TOBPCA) is proposed. Firstly, the background light of the degraded underwater image is computed using a dark channel prior; secondly, the degraded underwater RGB images are converted to CIELAB color space. Then, the transmission map of the lightness (L) component of CIELAB color space is represented and optimization of the transmission map is performed. Then, the Principal component analysis is used to fuse the background light and optimized transmission map. Finally, color correction is applied to enhance the underwater image. The proposed method is evaluated on the underwater color cast set (UCCS), underwater image quality set (UIQS), and underwater image enhancement benchmark (UIEB) Database based on Patch-based contrast quality index (PCQI), underwater color image quality evaluation (UCIQE), Underwater image quality measure (UIQM), Structural similarity index (SSIM), Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and discrete entropy (DE) parameters. To verify the efficacy of the proposed method, a qualitative and quantitative comparison has been made on the UCCS, UIQS, and UIEB datasets. The result demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method, in terms of PCQI, UCIQE, SSIM, and DE parameters.

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Data availability

The underwater Image enhancement benchmark dataset is available at link: https://li-chongyi.github.io/proj_benchmark.html and the real-world underwater image enhancement dataset is available at link: https://github.com/dlut-dimt/Realworld-Underwater-Image-Enhancement-RUIE-Benchmark.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Delhi Technological University, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Amarendra Kumar Mishra, Manjeet Kumar & Mahipal Singh Choudhry

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  1. Amarendra Kumar Mishra
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  2. Manjeet Kumar
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Contributions

Amarendra Kumar Mishra helped in conceptualization, methodology, software, data curation, investigation, writing—original draft preparation. Manjeet Kumar was involved in conceptualization, methodology, investigation, visualization, writing—reviewing and editing, supervision. Mahipal Singh Choudhry contributed to investigation, visualization, writing—reviewing and editing, supervision.

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Correspondence to Manjeet Kumar.

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Mishra, A.K., Kumar, M. & Choudhry, M.S. Underwater image enhancement by using transmission optimization and background light estimation via principal component analysis fusion. SIViP 18, 3855–3865 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-024-03047-x

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