Underwater Image Enhancement by Multiscale Fusion Technique and Dehazing

Abstract

Nowadays, underwater imaging has acquired considerable attention since it finds application in underwater object identification, species life monitoring, oil/gas pipeline detection, pollution monitoring etc. Attenuation of light is one of the major problems in capturing these images. Therefore, enhancement of underwater image is an important task. Visual features of the image can be improved by various image enhancement techniques. A useful method is to build up a fusion and dehazing technique which process a degraded input image. The proposed fusion- based underwater image enhancement technique aims to provide a final picture, which overcome all the insufficiencies of the input image by considering various weight maps. This can be achieved by employing white balancing on the underwater image followed by contrast stretching correction. Then sharpening, multi scale fusion process and dehazing can be performed to improve the visual appearance.