Underwater imaging enhancement based on a polarization filter and histogram attenuation prior

Abstract Underwater images always suffer from low contrast and inaccurate colors due to scattering and absorption by particles when the target light propagates through turbid water. In this paper, we first found that a lot of intensity space is occupied by fewer pixels, called ‘tails’, on both sides of the histograms for the red, green and blue channels of the image. Based on this histogram attenuation prior and taking account of the advantage of a polarization filter we proposed an effective polarimetric recovery method to enhance the underwater image quality, which includes a specially designed histogram processing method, named ‘cut-tail histogram stretching’. This processing overcomes the limitation of traditional histogram-based methods and can further improve the restoration performance. The experimental results corresponding to underwater scenes with different turbidities and colors show that the proposed method can simultaneously enhance the image contrast and reduce the color distortion to some extent, and thus realize clear underwater vision.