Enhancement of Underwater Images using Color Correction and Weight Maps

Physical characteristics of underwater environments, such as absorption, scattering, and progressive color loss, are only a few of the many factors that cause underwater images to degrade. Additionally, the turbid water and marine plankton influence the degradation of these images. All of these play a major role in the difficulty of extracting features from underwater images. This study aims to develop a new system that combines color correction techniques and weight maps to address the challenges caused by underwater environments. First step: the color correction, which consists of both color compensation and white balance, are used to improve the colors of images. In the second step: a comprehensive enhancement solution has been adopted on the two images that resulted from the first step by performing two different ways, the first image is improved by an image sharpening algorithm, and the gamma correction is used to process the second one. Four weights maps are applied for feature extraction and finally multi-scale fusion process is used to find the final enhanced image. Three types of underwater scenes are used (Bluish, Greenish and Foggy) to assess the suggested work. In addi