A Review on Intelligence Dehazing and Color Restoration for Underwater Images

Underwater image processing is an intelligence research field that has great potential to help developers better explore the underwater environment. Underwater image processing has been used in a wide variety of fields, such as underwater microscopic detection, terrain scanning, mine detection, telecommunication cables, and autonomous underwater vehicles. However, underwater imagery suffers from strong absorption, scattering, color distortion, and noise from the artificial light sources, causing image blur, haziness, and a bluish or greenish tone. Therefore, the enhancement of underwater imagery can be divided into two methods: 1) underwater image dehazing and 2) underwater image color restoration. This paper presents the reason for underwater image degradation, surveys the state-of-the-art intelligence algorithms like deep learning methods in underwater image dehazing and restoration, demonstrates the performance of underwater image dehazing and color restoration with different methods, introduces an underwater image color evaluation metric, and provides an overview of the major underwater image applications. Finally, we summarize the application of underwater image processing.