Underwater Image Enhancement Using Improved CNN Based Defogging

Due to refraction, absorption, and scattering of light by suspended particles in water, underwater images are characterized by low contrast, blurred details, and color distortion. In this paper, a fusion algorithm to restore and enhance underwater images is proposed. It consists of a color restoration module, an end-to-end defogging module and a brightness equalization module. In the color restoration module, a color balance algorithm based on CIE Lab color model is proposed to alleviate the effect of color deviation in underwater images. In the end-to-end defogging module, one end is the input image and the other end is the output image. A CNN network is proposed to connect these two ends and to improve the contrast of the underwater images. In the CNN network, a sub-network is used to reduce the depth of the network that needs to be designed to obtain the same features. Several depth separable convolutions are used to reduce the amount of calculation parameters required during network training. The basic attention module is introduced to highlight some important areas in the image. In order to improve the defogging network’s ability to extract overall information, a cross-layer connection and pooling pyramid module are added. In the brightness equalization module, a contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization method is used to coordinate the overall brightness. The proposed fusion algorithm for underwater image restoration and enhancement is verified by experiments and comparison with previous deep learning models and traditional methods. Comparison results show that the color correction and detail enhancement by the proposed method are superior.