Underwater Single-Image Restoration with Transmission Estimation Using Color Constancy

Abstract

The issue of underwater image restoration was investigated in this paper. Specifically, the color constancy of a single image was used to estimate the transmission map (TM), which can be used in the image formation model to restore the underwater image. First, the illumination component based on color constancy was used to estimate the refined TM without performing the guided filter or soft matting operation. Second, the statistical property of the pixel was used to fine-tune the color unbalance of underwater images. Finally, both qualitative and quantitative experimental results showed that the proposed method can not only obtain better restoration results, but also improve the real-time performance in different underwater scenes compared with other underwater image restoration methods.