Underwater image enhancement via red channel maximum attenuation prior and multi-scale detail fusion

The underwater environment poses great challenges, which have a negative impact on the capture and processing of underwater images. However, currently underwater imaging systems cannot adapt to various underwater environments to guarantee image quality. To address this problem, this paper designs an efficient underwater image enhancement approach that gradually adjusts colors, increases contrast, and enhances details. Based on the red channel maximum attenuation prior, we initially adjust the blue and green channels and correct the red channel from the blue and green channels. Subsequently, the maximum and minimum brightness blocks are estimated in multiple channels to globally stretch the image, which also includes our improved guided noise reduction filtering. Finally, in order to amplify local details without affecting the naturalness of the results, we use a pyramid fusion model to fuse local details extracted from two methods, taking into account the detail restoration effect of the optical model. The enhanced underwater image through our method has rich colors without distortion, effectively improved contrast and details. The objective and subjective evaluations indicate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art methods currently. Furthermore, our approach is versatile and can be applied to diverse underwater scenes, which facilitates subsequent applications.& COPY; 2023 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement