Underwater image enhancement using inherent optical properties

This paper describes a novel method of enhancing shallow ocean optical images or videos using a fast dark channel prior descattering method. Absorption, scattering and color distortion are three major distortion problems for underwater imaging. In this paper, we propose a novel shallow water imaging model to compensate for the attenuation discrepancy along the propagation path and an effective underwater scene enhancement scheme. The recovered images are characterized by a reduced noised level, better exposure of the dark regions, and improved global contrast where the finest details and edges are enhanced significantly.