An Underwater Image Restoration Method Based on Adaptive Brightness Improvement and Local Image Descattering

This letter proposes an effective underwater image restoration method that consists of a local image descattering and an adaptive brightness improvement. First, we establish an adaptive objective function for improving the brightness of underwater image according to the best-preserved channel of an image, and an augmented Lagrange multiplier-based alternating direction minimization algorithm is derived to solve the optimization problem. Second, we introduce a local transmission estimation method that takes into account the different attenuation of light on the red, green, and blue channels, which overcomes the limitation that existing methods heavily depend on global transmission over the entire image. Extensive experiments on real-world underwater images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in underwater image restoration. Moreover, our method shows good generalization capability for enhancing remote sensing and nighttime images.