Color Restoration of Underwater Images
Dana Menaker, Tali Treibitz and Shai Avidan
Abstract
Underwater images suffer from color distortion and low contrast, because light is
attenuated as it propagates through water. The attenuation varies with wavelength and
depends both on the properties of the water body in which the image was taken and
the 3D structure of the scene, making it difficult to restore the colors. Existing single
underwater image enhancement techniques either ignore the wavelength dependency of
the attenuation, or assume a specific spectral profile. We propose a new method that takes
into account multiple spectral profiles of different water types, and restores underwater
scenes from a single image.
We show that by estimating just two additional global parameters - the attenuation
ratios of the blue-red and blue-green color channels - the problem of underwater image
restoration can be reduced to single image dehazing, where all color channels have the
same attenuation coefficients. Since we do not know the water type ahead of time, we
try different parameter sets out of an existing library of water types. Each set leads to
a different restored image and the one that best satisfies the Gray-World assumption is
chosen. The proposed single underwater image restoration method is fully automatic and
is based on a more comprehensive physical image formation model than previously used.
We collected a dataset of real images taken in different locations with varying water properties and placed color charts in the scenes. Moreover, to obtain ground truth,
the 3D structure of the scene was calculated based on stereo imaging.
Session
Posters
Files
Paper (PDF)
DOI
10.5244/C.31.44
https://dx.doi.org/10.5244/C.31.44
Citation
Dana Menaker, Tali Treibitz and Shai Avidan. Color Restoration of Underwater Images. In T.K. Kim, S. Zafeiriou, G. Brostow and K. Mikolajczyk, editors, Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), pages 44.1-44.12. BMVA Press, September 2017.
Bibtex
@inproceedings{BMVC2017_44,
title={Color Restoration of Underwater Images},
author={Dana Menaker, Tali Treibitz and Shai Avidan},
year={2017},
month={September},
pages={44.1-44.12},
articleno={44},
numpages={12},
booktitle={Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)},
publisher={BMVA Press},
editor={Tae-Kyun Kim, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Gabriel Brostow and Krystian Mikolajczyk},
doi={10.5244/C.31.44},
isbn={1-901725-60-X},
url={https://dx.doi.org/10.5244/C.31.44}
}