Low Complexity Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Dark Channel Prior

Blurred underwater image is always an annoying problem in the oceanic engineering. In this paper, we propose an efficient and low complexity underwater image enhancement method based on dark channel prior. Our method employs the median filter instead of the soft matting procedure to estimate the depth map of image. Moreover, a color correction method is adopted to enhance the color contrast for underwater image. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively enhance the underwater image and reduce the execution time. Besides, this method requires less computing resource and is well suitable for implementing on the surveillance and underwater navigation in real time.