Abstract: Considering the problems of low contrast and color distortion caused by scattering and attenuation of the light in the underwater environment, the underwater color image enhancement method is presented in this paper, which integrated dark channel prior and the color correction algorithm based on channel histogram quantization. Firstly, for the underwater color image to be enhanced, underwater optical imaging model is established and the optimized and improved dark channel prior algorithm is used for image deblurring. Then, by analyzing the cumulative histogram of the deblurring image R, G, B three channels, the gray value of the each channel is quantified to achieve color correction of the image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the image blur caused by the scattering of light, improve the visual quality of the underwater image and restore color balance of the underwater image.

Key words: image processing; underwater color image enhancement; dark channel prior; color balance