Hybrid Adaptive Color Recovery (HACR): A Fundamental Pre-Processing Step for Image Restoration

Images captured in challenging environments such as haze, underwater scenes, or artificial lighting often suffer from color degradation. In many cases, one color channel becomes weak, leading to loss of important visual information. To address this problem, this paper proposes a preprocessing method called Hybrid Adaptive Color Recovery (HACR). The method analyzes the relationship between color channels and adaptively compensates the weakened channel to restore color balance. By acting as a preprocessing step, HACR helps improve the performance of image restoration techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces more consistent colors and better visual quality compared to conventional preprocessing approaches.