3 research outputs found
Visual-Quality-Driven Learning for Underwater Vision Enhancement
The image processing community has witnessed remarkable advances in enhancing
and restoring images. Nevertheless, restoring the visual quality of underwater
images remains a great challenge. End-to-end frameworks might fail to enhance
the visual quality of underwater images since in several scenarios it is not
feasible to provide the ground truth of the scene radiance. In this work, we
propose a CNN-based approach that does not require ground truth data since it
uses a set of image quality metrics to guide the restoration learning process.
The experiments showed that our method improved the visual quality of
underwater images preserving their edges and also performed well considering
the UCIQE metric.Comment: Accepted for publication and presented in 2018 IEEE International
Conference on Image Processing (ICIP
An Experimental-Based Review of Image Enhancement and Image Restoration Methods for Underwater Imaging
Underwater images play a key role in ocean exploration, but often suffer from severe quality degradation due to light absorption and scattering in water medium. Although major breakthroughs have been made recently in the general area of image enhancement and restoration, the applicability of new methods for improving the quality of underwater images has not specifically been captured. In this paper, we review the image enhancement and restoration methods that tackle typical underwater image impairments, including some extreme degradations and distortions. Firstly, we introduce the key causes of quality reduction in underwater images, in terms of the underwater image formation model (IFM). Then, we review underwater restoration methods, considering both the IFM-free and the IFM-based approaches. Next, we present an experimental-based comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art IFM-free and IFM-based methods, considering also the prior-based parameter estimation algorithms of the IFM-based methods, using both subjective and objective analysis (the used code is freely available at https://github.com/wangyanckxx/Single-Underwater-Image-Enhancement-and-Color-Restoration). Starting from this study, we pinpoint the key shortcomings of existing methods, drawing recommendations for future research in this area. Our review of underwater image enhancement and restoration provides researchers with the necessary background to appreciate challenges and opportunities in this important field