An approach to underwater image enhancement based on image structural decomposition

Underwater imaging posts a challenge due to the degradation by the absorption and scattering occurred during light propagation as well as poor lighting conditions in water medium. Although image filtering techniques are utilized to improve image quality effectively, problems of the distortion of image details and the bias of color correction still exist in output images due to the complexity of image texture distribution. This paper proposes a new underwater image enhancement method based on image structural decomposition. By introducing a curvature factor into the Mumford_Shah_G decomposition algorithm, image details and structure components are better preserved without the gradient effect. Thus, histogram equalization and Retinex algorithms are applied in the decomposed structure component for global image enhancement and non-uniform brightness correction for gray level and the color images, then the optical absorption spectrum in water medium is incorporate to improve the color correction. Finally, the enhanced structure and preserved detail component are recomposed to generate the output. Experiments with real underwater images verify the image improvement by the proposed method in image contrast, brightness and color fidelity.