Research On Color Image Enhancement In Underwater Scattering Media

Seawater, as a typical scattering media, makes the high-resolution underwater vision technique influenced by the degradation of underwater imaging. Image degradation results from attenuation and scattering caused by environmental media. Forward scattering causes the slight blur of image details, while backscattering causes serious image spray. In order to improve the quality of underwater image, this paper does the research on color image enhancement in underwater environment.This paper introduces the optical properties of the scattering media, the research status of scattering media imaging, the optical properties of water and the characteristics of underwater images. The absorption effect of media leads to attenuation of the incident light’s energy, while the scattering effect changed the light’s spreading direction. Therefore, the scattering effect is the main reason of image degradation. This paper describes the process of color images enhancement. After reducing noise processed through a high-pass filter in the RGB color space, we transformed the RGB color space to the HSV color space. Then we extracted luminosity component and estimated the optical information in HSV color space. After that, the image was further optimized with an improved Laplace filter presented in this paper. Combining the underwater optical information and the calculated luminosity component, the saturation of image in HSV color space was abstracted and corrected. At last, the image was restored after transforming the information of the luminosity component and the corrected saturation to the RGB color space. This paper improved the detail of underwater image, and according to the correction of saturation, the recovery of underwater image has less color distortion. Compared with other methods, this proposed method has advantages of less color distortion and better overall effects in a shorter operating time.