Robust Chromatic Adaptation Based Color Correction Technology for Underwater Images

Abstract

Recovering correct or at least realistic colors of underwater scenes is a challenging issue for image processing due to the unknown imaging conditions including the optical water type, scene location, illumination, and camera settings. With the assumption that the illumination of the scene is uniform, a chromatic adaptation-based color correction technology is proposed in this paper to remove the color cast using a single underwater image without any other information. First, the underwater RGB image is first linearized to make its pixel values proportional to the light intensities arrived at the pixels. Second, the illumination is estimated in a uniform chromatic space based on the white-patch hypothesis. Third, the chromatic adaptation transform is implemented in the device-independent XYZ color space. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations both show that the proposed method outperforms the other test methods in terms of color restoration, especially for the images with severe color cast. The proposed method is simple yet effective and robust, which is helpful in obtaining the in-air images of underwater scenes.