Enhancing Underwater Imagery via Latent Low-Rank Decomposition and Image Fusion

The quality of underwater images is usually degraded due to the absorption and scattering effect of seawater, which leads to image distortion and reduces the accuracy and efficiency of subsequent vision tasks. To solve the above problems, an enhancement method for underwater images based on latent low-rank decomposition and image fusion is proposed in this article. First, a color correction method based on adaptive channel compensation is implemented to remove color distortion. Second, an improved Laplace sharpening method and gamma correction technology are applied to effectively improve the sharpness and contrast of the underwater image. Finally, a dual-image weighted image fusion based on latent low-rank representation is proposed to integrate the enhanced image. The experimental results show that this method can obtain better results than other traditional methods on both color reproduction and detail preservation. Furthermore, a set of application tests is executed to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.