Adjustment of Pixel Intensity for Removal of Color Casts in Underwater Images

Abstract

This article introduces a new color correction method based on the adjustment of pixel intensity to remove color casts in underwater images. As the underwater images are captured in non-homogeneous with nonuniform illumination, the Gray-World Assumption (GWA) causes red artefacts. The method mainly aims to overcome the drawback of GWA for white balancing the underwater images. Before employing GWA, the underwater image is preprocessed by adding a color inferiority-reducing factor to the inferior channels to increase the pixel intensity level. The GWA is applied to preserve the information for substantially removing color casts. The image is adjusted by saturating the 1% top and bottom intensity levels pixels to remove the water haze. The color dominancy balanced image is finetuned by multi-scale image fusion technique with three derived inputs. The proposed method outperforms qualitatively and quantitatively based on the comparative analysis with four existing methods.