A variational model for sea image enhancement

Abstract

The purpose of sea image enhancement is to enhance the information of the waves, whose contrast is generally weak. Enhancement effect is often affected by impulse-type noise and non-uniform illumination. In this paper, we propose a variationalmodel for sea image enhancement using a solar halo model and a Retinex model. This paper mainly makes the following three contributions: 1. Establishing a Retinex model with noise suppression ability in sea images; 2. Establishing a solar-scattering halo model through sea image bitplane analysis; 3. Proposing a variational enhancementmodel combining the Retinex and halo models. The experimental results show that our method has a significant enhancement effect on sea surface images in different illumination environments compared with typical methods.