A New Underwater Image Enhancing Method via
Color Correction and Illumination Adjustment
Wenhao Zhang 1 , Ge Li 2 , Zhenqiang Ying 3
School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School
Lishui Road 2199, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China 518055
1 2
1601214037@sz.pku.edu.cn geli@ece.pku.edu.cn
Abstract—Since the light will be absorbed and scattered when
travels in water, underwater imaging exists three major difficul-
ties, including color cast, under-exposure, and fuzz. The solutions
to overcome those issues are important for the exploration
of the ocean. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for
improving the quality of underwater images. The algorithm is
composed of two components: color correction and illumination
adjustment. First, we use an efficient color enhancement method
to solve the color cast. Then, based on Retinex model, we make
the illumination adjustment, mainly extracting the illumination
map and implementing gamma correction on it successively.
Experimental results show that visual performance of our method
outperforms that of other methods, and processing complexity is
relatively simpler.
Index Terms—underwater image enhancement, color correc-
tion, illumination adjustment, visual performance, processing
complexity
I. I NTRODUCTION
The research on underwater imaging is important for ocean
resources exploration, marine ecological research, and marine
military applications. However, underwater environment is
severe, since the light is highly absorbed and scattered by
medium. The light is scattered by large suspend particles
reflecting into different directions, which leads to the captured
image fuzzy. Moreover, the light is absorbed by water reducing
the energy of light rays, which results in image under-exposure
[1] and color cast. The reason of color cast is that the
different wavelength of light has different absorbing rate [2].
When reaching to a certain depth, the longer wavelengths
of light will disappear first. In short, underwater imaging
processing will meet three main difficulties, including color
cast, fuzz, and under-exposure. To make the captured images
more suitable for observation, it needs to be processed to
restore the relatively genuine color and natural appearance.
Many approaches are proposed to enhance underwater im-
age. At early stage, underwater image enhancement method
comes from generic image enhancement methods, such as
Histogram Equalization method, Generalized Unsharp Mask-
ing method and Probability-Based method. Gradually, some
dehazing methods are adopted in underwater enhancement
filed, since the underwater imaging has the similar foggy
condition as terrestrial imaging. Fattal’s SID method [3] used
the fact that the surface shading and transmission functions
are statistically uncorrelated in local to remove the fog. He’s
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c IEEE.
3
zqying@pku.edu.cn
Fig. 1. Top Row: Three raw underwater images. Bottom Row: The enhanced
results by our method
DCP [4] method proposed the dark channel prior that haze-
free images have at least one color channel with a very
low intensity, one can estimate the transmission map with
the dark channel prior. However, the dehazing methods cant
provide satisfactory color correction for the reduction in the
red channel caused by the absorption, since only considering
the effect of scattering.
Method in [5] makes a fusion with different filters to
reconstruct a clear underwater image. Fu’s method [6] exploits
the Retinex model to decompose the observed image into the
reflectance component and illumination component. Then it
makes post-processing on reflectance and illumination compo-
nents, respectively. Fu’s method can get a good result, but the
complexity is too high. Inspired by fusion and Retinex model,
we propose a new underwater image enhancement method,
which is composed of two components: color correction and
illumination adjustment. For color correction component, we
use a simple and effective normalization method. For illu-
mination adjustment component, the Retinex theory [7] is
exploited. Through decomposing the illumination map from
the light layer of captured image, we make the initialization,
refinement and gamma correction in order. Finally, we get the
desired reflectance image, which can solve the under-exposed
problems.
The contribution of our proposed method:
• We propose a framework combining color correction
method and illumination adjustment method, which is a
good solution to solve the color cast and under-exposed
issues.
VCIP 2017, Dec. 10 - 13, 2017, St Petersburg, U.S.A.

Fig. 2. A flow chart of the proposed method.
• Based on Retinex model, we propose a new illumina-
tion adjustment method. In the process of solving the
optimization problem, we use a fast approximate method
instead of traditional iteration solution.
II. PROPOSED METHOD
A flowchart of the proposed method is shown in Fig.2. The
method contains two steps: color correction to solve the color
cast and illumination adjustment to improve the lightness.
A. Color Correction
Since the blue color and green color travel longer in
the water due to shorter wavelength, underwater images are
dominated by blue color or green color. As shown in Fig. 3(a),
the underwater image captured in certain depth is greenish. As
shown in histogram distributions of three channels, the mean
of red channel is smaller than that of green channel. According
to the gray world assumption, for an image with a large amount
of color change, the average of three channels tends to be the
same. Meanwhile, the histogram distribution ranges of three
channels don’t cover [0,255]. To address the color cast, a color
correction method based on gray world assumption is adopted.
The color correction method calculates the mean value and the
variance value among three channels, independently. Then we
exploit the feature values of each channel: mean and variance,
to design a new normalization range as follows:
Lcmax = Lcmean + λLcvar
(1)
Lcmin = Lcmean − λLcvar
where c ∈ {r, g, b}, Lcmean and Lcvar are the mean and
variance of the captured underwater image, respectively, Lcmax
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c IEEE.
Fig. 3. color correction: (a) the raw underwater image and its histograms
of three channels, (b) the color corrected image and its histograms of three
channels.
and Lcmin are the maximum and the minimum values used for
normalization. λ is a parameter to control the image dynamic
range, empirically set to 2. If the parameter value is too low,
will cause the result image over-enhacement. If the parameter
value is too high, will lead in under-enhancement. Finally, we
make a normalization based on [Lcmin , Lcmax ] to get the color
corrected results. The average of three channels tends to be the
same and the histogram distribution ranges of three channels
cover total x-axis.
B. Illumination Adjustment
After correcting the color, the image still exists the under-
exposed issue. But now we only need to focus on the illumi-
nation. So we convert RGB space of color corrected image
to HSV space, then exploit the Value layer of HSV space to
make the illumination adjustment.
Based on Retinex model, we decompose the energy of Value
layer of color corrected image into two components:
Vcr = R · M, (2)
where Vcr is the Value layer of color corrected image, R
is the reflectance component of Vcr and M is illumination
component of Vcr . The underwater environment has the
different condition of illumination, since the scattering and
absorbing effects make the light changeable [8]. Removing the
influence of changeable illumination M, we can get the stable
reflectance of observed scene R, that is the real appearance
of the scene.
According to equation (2), it is an ill-posed problem to
compute R and M under one known variable Vcr . We can
estimate illumination map firstly, then make a correction on
illumination map. Finally, through the equation (2) and the
corrected illumination map, we can easily get the enhanced
reflectance component, namely the desired image solved the
under-exposure.
1) illumination map estimation: First, we use the Value
layer of HSV space as the initial of illumination map, M0 ←
Vcr . According to the prior that the estimated illumination
map need to preserve the complete structure of edges and
smooth the details, we build a optimization method as follow-
ing formulation:
2
min M0 − M2 + α W · M1 ,
M
(3)
where α is used to controll the trade-off between the fidelity
term and gradient term, setting as 0.5. W is the weight matrix.
VCIP 2017, Dec. 10 - 13, 2017, St Petersburg, U.S.A.
 is the difference operator at both in horizontal and vertical A. Subjective Comparison
directions. ∗1 and ∗2 are the l1 and l2 norm, respectively.
The design of W is key to distinguishing from the strong
structure edges and the textures. A major edge in a local win-
dow contributes more similar-direction gradients than textures
with complex patterns [9]. Therefore, The weight in a window
that contains meaningful edges should be smaller than that
in a window only containing textures. The weight matrix is
designed as follows:

1
Wd (x) =  
 , d ∈ {h, v} , (4)
 y∈Ω(x) d M0 (y) + ε

where Ω(x) is the local window centered at the pixel x and

and ε is a very small constant to avoid the zero denominator,
d denotes horizontal direction, h or vertical direction, v.
The equation (3) has the derivate form, literaturely the
calculation applies iteration method, such as gradient descent
method. However, it will consume relatively long time to pro-
cess one image, which is impractical for industrial application.
To speed up the calculation, we approximate the equation (3)
to the following formulation:
  Wd (x) · (d M(x))2
min ((M0 (x)−M(x))2 +α
M
x
|d M0 (x)| + ε
d∈{h,v}
(5)
We can see that the problem only involves quadratic terms.
So we can use the derivation to get the optimized M. Solving
linear quation can reach O(N ) complexity. Compared to the
complexity of Gradient Descent Algorithm, our solver avoids
the iteration requirement as well as reduces N logN to N .
optimized
2) illumination correction: Getting the estimated illumina-
tion, we manipulate the illumination map, M̃, through gamma
correction, namely M̃ ← M̃γ . During the transformation
procedure, γ is a parameter controlling the enhance degree of
illumination. The best enhancement to contrast and variable
detail is γ = 0.4.
Fig. 5. Subjective Comparison: (a) raw underwater image, (b)HE-Lab
method, (c) SID method, (d) DCP method, (e) Fu method, (f) our method.
The subjective comparison is shown in Fig. 5. HE-Lab1
method [10] can improve the contrast and reduce the compu-
tational complexity. However, it may cause over-enhancement
and artifacts at the background of image. For Fig. 5 (c-d),
although SID and DCP methods can remove the haze in
the raw underwater images, they can’t solve the color cast
). problems with satisfaction. Fu’s resulting image has lower
contrast of color than our method. For our method, the visual
effect is the best among above methods. The color is more
genuine, the light is improved, and structure and texture of
image are preserved well.
B. Objective Comparison
We test on four different datasets, which come from Lu’s
personal website2 . These datasets are collected from under-
water image enhancement researcher’s papers: Ancuti dataset
[5], CB dataset [10], Chiang dataset [11], Fattal dataset [3].
1) Quality Comparison: UIQM(Underwater Image Quality
Measurement) [12] is the most excellent evaluation method
specially for underwater image. A good measurement of
UIQM means that the method can better balance among the
chroma, saturation, and contrast.
TABLE I
C OMPARISON OF UIQM ON DIFFERENT DATASETS

Method Ancuti CB Chiang Fattal

HE 1.363 1.363 1.470 1.465
SID 1.315 1.315 1.376 1.572
DCP 1.519 1.519 1.464 1.644
Fu 1.593 1.593 1.602 1.571
Fig. 4. illumination map: (a)initial illumination map, (b) estimated illumi- Ours 1.717 1.717 1.577 1.663
nation map, (c) gammma correction illumination map.

As shown in Table 1, it summarizes the average results of

III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
All methods are implemented on a Windows 10 PC with
a 3.40GHz i7 CPU, running on Matlab R2016a. We make
subjective comparison and objective comparison among four
state-of-art underwater image enhancement methods and our
method.
UIQM on four datasets, using different methods. In the table
1, the values in bold represent the best results and the values
in red color represent second best results. For Ancuti dataset,
1 Making the histogram equalization on L layer of underwater image’s LAB
space
2 http://www.boss.ecs.kyutech.ac.jp/ luhuimin/dataset.html

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c IEEE. VCIP 2017, Dec. 10 - 13, 2017, St Petersburg, U.S.A.
CB dataset, and Fattal dataset, our method performs the under water. The method is composed of color correction and
best among other methods. In addition, our method performs illumination adjustment. First, by adopting special normaliza-
relatively good on Chiang dataset. tion method, we can greatly correct the color cast of images.
To further validate the robustness of our method, we make Then based on Retinex model, we improve the lightness of
experiments on integrated dataset including four datasets. As image. During the procedure of illumination adjustment, we
shown in Fig. 6, the height of histogram represents the variance preserve the structure edges and smooth the textures well.
range of evaluation index, and the red line denotes the mean Experiment results demonstrate that our method is superior
value of evaluation index. From the Fig. 6, we can see that the in genuine color, natural appearance, and visibility than state-
fluctuation of our method is the smallest among other methods, of-art methods. Besides, our method is robust and effective in
and the mean value is the highest. different datasets. The calculation of complexity is also lower
than other methods.
Matlab code of this paper are available at personal website3 .
Besides, Our method doesn’t take the fuzz into consideration.
If you want to enhance the fuzzy image in further, you can
add a dehaze step.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by Science and Technol-
ogy Planning Project of Guangdong Province, China (No.
2014B090910001 and No. 2014B010117007), Shenzhen Pea-
cock Plan (20130408-183003656), and the grant of National
Science Foundation of China (No.U1611461).
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IV. CONCLUSIONS
A new fast underwater image enhancement method is pro-
posed in this paper, which can solve the color cast and under-
exposed problems caused by the absorbing and scattering 3 https://github.com/zhangwenhao123/VCIP2017

978-1-5386-0462-5/17/$31.00 2017
c IEEE. VCIP 2017, Dec. 10 - 13, 2017, St Petersburg, U.S.A.