Underwater image enhancement by wavelet based fusion

The image captured in water is hazy due to the several effects of the underwater medium. These effects are governed by the suspended particles that lead to absorption and scattering of light during image formation process. The underwater medium is not friendly for imaging data and brings low contrast and fade color issues. Therefore, during any image based exploration and inspection activity, it is essential to enhance the imaging data before going for further processing. This paper presents a wavelet-based fusion method to enhance the hazy underwater images by addressing the low contrast and color alteration issues. The publicly available hazy underwater images are enhanced and analyzed qualitatively with some state of the art methods. The quantitative study of image quality depicts promising results. © 2016 IEEE.