Guided local laplacian filter-based image enhancement for deep-sea sensor networks

This paper describes a novel method of enhancing deep-sea optical images using guided local Laplacian filter. Absorption and are two major distortion issues for deep-sea optical imaging. While light traveling through the water, light rays are scattered and absorbed depending on the wavelength. Scattering is caused by large suspended particles, as in turbid water that contains abundant particles, which causes the degradation of the captured image. Absorption corresponds to the varying degrees of attenuation encountered by light traveling in water at different wavelengths that causing ambient underwater to be dominated by a bluish tone. Our key contributions are proposed include a novel deep-sea 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.