Retinex-inspired color correction and detail preserved fusion for underwater image enhancement

Many practical underwater applications need to address color cast, blurring, and low contrast of underwater images for display and further analysis. To cope with the aforementioned issues, a novel underwater image enhancement method based on Retinex-inspired color correction and detail preserved fusion technology is proposed. First, we employ a Retinex-inspired color correction strategy to remove the color cast induced by underwater light scattering. We then build on blending three images directly derived from a local contrast-enhanced version, a detail version, and a global contrast-enhanced version of the corrected underwater image. The local and global contrast-enhanced versions promote the transfer of color and contrast to the output image. Meanwhile, the detail version improves the edges and details of the output image. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrated that the proposed method achieves superior enhancement performance for underwater images of different scenes.