ENHANCING UNDERWATER IMAGE QUALITY: EVALUATING COMBINATIVE APPROACHES FOR EFFECTIVE IN SEAGRASS BED ECOSYSTEM

The Complex underwater characteristics, challenges for image processing tasks. These images often have poor visibility due to low contrast, light scattering and various types of interference. There is a lack of exploration into the effectiveness of existing underwater image enhancement methods, particularly in the context of seagrass ecosystems, allows for further investigation. This study aims to explore and evaluate the effectiveness of various methods in underwater image enhancement, including Colour Balanced, CLAHE, and Unsharp Masking and their combinations, starting with converting video data from UTS devices into two-dimensional images. Furthermore, the quality of images taken from underwater cameras placed in a complex and wild seagrass meadow environment was improved using the proposed method, and the quality was evaluated by the SSIM value. The results show that the CLAHE method has the highest average SSIM value of 0.898. Meanwhile, the combined Color Balanced-CLAHE method achieved an SSIM value of 0.683 in a separate evaluation. This combination is an innovative approach to address complex underwater image quality problems, providing a more specific and adaptive solution. Overall, the proposed method is able to improve the visual quality of images on aspects such as clarity, color, and visibility of objects in the image