Underwater image enhancement method based on color correction and three-interval histogram stretching

Since the attenuation and absorption of light in the water medium and the influence of the tiny suspended particles, underwater images are degraded and suffer from color cast and low contrast. An underwater image enhancement method based on color correction and three-interval histogram stretching is proposed to handle these issues. Firstly, a color correction method based on sub-interval linear transformation is designed to achieve color correction. Meanwhile, using the three adaptive sub-histograms equalization algorithm to enhance the contrast, and then the resulting images of the above-mentioned methods are combined by the multi-scale fusion. Final experiments demonstrate the proposed method can improve the image contrast, obtain the details of the bright and dark regions of the image, rich color, and finally output high-quality images.