Scattered Light Compensation Combined with Color Preservation and Contrast Balance for Underwater Image Enhancement

In view of color deviation, low contrast, and blurring in underwater images, an underwater image enhancement method based on scattered light compensation combined with color preservation and contrast balance was proposed. Firstly, the relative total variational model was used to separate the structure and texture layer of the image. Specifically, the color deviation of the structural layer was corrected by defining a compensation coefficient error matrix based on the RGB spatial mapping, and the texture layer was enhanced by filtering separation and fusion to prevent the initial feature loss of the image. The enhanced texture layer was superimposed with the structural layer to obtain the output of the first layer. Besides, in the contrast balance module, color preservation-contrast limiting adaptive histogram equalization based on spatial transformation was performed to further improve the contrast and brightness. Finally, the enhanced results of the two layers were fused to output the image. Comparison conducted on different datasets verifies that the proposed method has better performance in balancing color deviation, enhancing details, and deblurring, which has practical application value in unmanned undersea system-based vision tasks.