Underwater Image Color Correction via Color Channel Transfer

Underwater images often reveal color distortion and poor visibility due to light propagation in water being affected by the selective absorption and scattering of suspended particles. This letter presents an efficient color channel transfer (CCT) method that largely restores color distortion and improves visibility of underwater images. Any captured underwater image with at least one color channel is highly attenuated in real underwater imaging. To compensate for the loss of information in the attenuated channel, the CCT transfers the degraded image to the CIELab color space and compensates for the loss of information in the degraded image by adjusting luminance and chrominance. The reference values of the color transfer image are statistically calculated from many high-quality images to ensure a relatively balanced color distribution. Extensive experiments on three underwater image datasets show that after applying our CCT, the enhancement method leads to satisfactory results in both metric scores and runtimes.