Multi-Space Feature Fusion and Entropy-Based Metrics for Underwater Image Quality Assessment

In marine remote sensing, underwater images play an indispensable role in ocean exploration, owing to their richness in information and intuitiveness. However, underwater images often encounter issues such as color shifts, loss of detail, and reduced clarity, leading to the decline of image quality. Therefore, it is critical to study precise and efficient methods for assessing underwater image quality. A no-reference multi-space feature fusion and entropy-based metrics for underwater image quality assessment (MFEM-UIQA) are proposed in this paper. Considering the color shifts of underwater images, the chrominance difference map is created from the chrominance space and statistical features are extracted. Moreover, considering the information representation capability of entropy, entropy-based multi-channel mutual information features are extracted to further characterize chrominance features. For the luminance space features, contrast features from luminance images based on gamma correction and luminance uniformity features are extracted. In addition, logarithmic Gabor filtering is applied to the luminance space images for subband decomposition and entropy-based mutual information of subbands is captured. Furthermore, underwater image noise features, multi-channel dispersion information, and visibility features are extracted to jointly represent the perceptual features. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed MFEM-UIQA surpasses the state-of-the-art methods.