Multiscale Fusion Method for the Enhancement of Low-Light Underwater Images

To solve the color cast and low contrast of underwater images caused by the effects of light absorption and scattering, we propose a novel underwater image enhancement method via bi-interval histogram equalization. The proposed method consists of three main parts: color correction, contrast enhancement, and multiscale fusion. First, the color cast is eliminated by automatic white balancing. Then, homomorphic filtering is adopted to decompose the image into high-frequency information and low-frequency information, the high-frequency information is enhanced by the gradient field bi-interval equalization which enhances the contrast and details of the image, and the low-frequency information is disposed via gamma correction for adjusting the exposure. Finally, we adopt a multiscale fusion strategy to fuse the high-frequency information, high-frequency after bi-interval equalization, and low-frequency information based on contrast, saturation, and exposure. Qualitative and quantitative performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively enhance the details and global contrast of the image and achieve better exposedness of the dark areas, which outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.