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Underwater image restoration using oblique gradient operator and light attenuation prior

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Abstract

Underwater captured images are often degraded with low contrast, color distortion, and poor visibility caused by absorption and scattering when light travels through water. To address these issues, we propose a novel underwater image restoration method which aims at recovering the scene radiance with an accurate scene depth. Depending on the accuracy estimation of scene depth obtained by combing the oblique gradient operator and underwater light attenuation prior, the transmission map can be further precisely determined. Moreover, we utilize the quad-tree subdivision to estimate the background light by both considering smoothness and color difference. After acquiring the background light and transmission map, the scene radiance can be finally restored based on the underwater image formation model. Experiential results demonstrate that the proposed method has a good performance on dehazing, color correction and contrast enhancement. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with several state-of-the-art methods further validate the superiority of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgments

The research work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61901240), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (No. ZR2019BF042, ZR2019MF050), the Marine S&T Fund of Shandong Province for Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Qingdao) (No.2022QNLM050301), and China Scholarship Council (No. 201908370002), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2017 M612204).

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  1. College of Computer Science & Technology, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, China

    Jingyi Li, Guojia Hou & Guodong Wang

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  1. Jingyi Li
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Correspondence to Guojia Hou.

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Li, J., Hou, G. & Wang, G. Underwater image restoration using oblique gradient operator and light attenuation prior. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 6625–6645 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13605-5

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