A New Database for Evaluating Underwater Image Processing Methods

In this paper, we present a new, large-scale database on underwater image, which is called the NWPU underwater image database. This database contains 6240 underwater images of 40 objects. Each object is captured with 6 different levels of turbidity water, 4 lighting conditions and 6 different distances. Among them, we use the underwater images with turbidity value of 0 as Ground-truth. In addition, we captured the shadowless image of the object in the air and clear water. Different from other underwater databases, we capture underwater images with real high turbidity lake water instead of simulating the turbidity of water. This method ensures that the underwater images we captured are as close as possible to the real environment. We have given the database baseline which contains multi-scale Retinex with color restore (MSRCR) algorithms for enhancing images and four commonly used image quality evaluation criteria, including two full-references and two no-references methods. The four image quality evaluation methods include two no-reference and two full reference.