Automatic Underwater Image Pre-Processing

Abstract

A novel pre-processing filter is proposed for underwater image restoration. Because of specific transmission properties of light in the water, underwater image suffers from limited range, non uniform lighting, low contrast, color diminished, important blur. . .Today pre- processing methods typically only concentrates on non uniform lighting or color correction and often require additional knowledge of the environment. The algorithm proposed in this paper is an automatic algorithm to pre-process underwater images. It reduces underwater perturbations, and improves image quality. It is composed of several successive independent processing steps which correct non uniform illumination, suppress noise, enhance contrast and adjust colors. Performances of filtering will be assessed using an edge detection robustness criterion.