COCHIN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

KOCHI - 682022

SEMINAR REPORT
on

UNDERWATER IMAGE ENHANCEMENT

BY DARK PRIOR CHANNEL

In partial fulfillment for the award of the degree

Of
Bachelor Of Technology
In

ELECTRONICS &COMMUNICATION
ENGINEERING
at

COCHIN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

KUTTANAD
Submitted by

CHIRANJIVI KUMAR
(Reg.no. 13130216)

COCHIN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE &TECHNOLOGY

COCHIN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
KUTTANAD- 688504

Department of

ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNIACTION ENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE
Certified that this is a bonafied record of the seminar entitled

UNDERWATER IMAGE ENHANCEMENT

BY DARK PRIOR CHANNEL
Submitted by

CHIRANJIVI KUMAR
(reg. no.13130216)

During the year 2015 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of
Degree of Bachelor of Technology in Electronics & communication Engineering
of Cochin University of Science & Technology.

Seminar co-ordinator
Mr. SAM VARGHESE

Head of the Department

Mr. ANIL KUMAR K K

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Many people have contributed to the success of this paper. Although a single sentence hardly
suffices, I would like to thank the Almighty God for blessing me with his grace and taking my
endeavor to a successful culmination. I am extremely grateful to my Principal
Dr. P.S Srijith for his wholehearted cooperation for the successful completion of paper. I
extend my sincere and heart-full thanks to Mr. Anil Kumar K.K. Head of Department
(Electronics And Communication Engineering) for providing me the right ambience for
carrying out the work on this paper and for the facilities provided to me. I am profoundly
indebted to my seminar- in charge, Mrs. Akhila L, lecturer in Department of Electronics And
Communication Engineering for her innumerable acts of timely advice, encouragement and I
sincerely express my gratitude to her. I would like to extend my gratitude to all the staff of the
Department of Electronics And Communication Engineering for the help and support rendered
to me. I have been benefitted a lot from the feedback and suggestions given to me by them.

CHIRANJIVI KUMAR
(Reg.no. 13130216)

ABSTRACT

Light scattering and color change are two main problems in underwater images. Due to light
scattering, incident light gets reflected and deflected multiple times by particles present in the
water. This degrades the visibility and contrast of the underwater image.
Dark channel prior is method used for removing the haze present
in the underwater image. It is based on a key observation - most local patches in haze-free
underwater images contain some pixels which have very low intensities in at least one color
channel. Using this prior with the haze imaging color model estimates the thickness of the
haze and recover a high quality haze free image.
This method does not require images with different exposure
values, and is entirely based on the attenuation experienced by point across multiple frames.
In this paper underwater image enhancement using Dark channel prior is attempted. Results
shows that the performance of this method is better compared to image enhancement using
histogram equalization.
The existing research shows that underwater images give new
challenges and significant problems because of light scattering effect. From the last few
years, a growing interest in marine research has encouraged researchers from different
disciplines to explorer the mysterious underwater world. A significant amount of literature
is available on underwater image processing.

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.

2.

Introduction
What Is Image Enhancement

Types of image Enhancement

2.1 Histogram Equalization

2.2 Image Dehazing
2.3 WCID Process

3.

Dark Prior Channel

11

3.1 Color feature Extraction

3.2 Estimating the light source of illumination
3.3 Dark Channel Estimation
3.4 Haze Removal

4.

Experimental Results

15

5.

Conclusion

17

6.

References

18

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE NO.

TITLE

PAGE NO.

1. Natural light enters in the water from air

2. Histogram equalization applied to low

Contrast image
3. The original image and dehazed image in Fog

4. Image formation model

5. WCID flow diagram

6. Underwater enhanced Image

DEPT.OF ECE

15

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

1. INTRODUCTION
Image enhancement improves the visibility of one aspect or component of an image. It
refers to sharpening of image features such as boundaries, or contrast to make a graphic
display. This is mainly useful for display & analysis. This process will not increase the
intrinsic information of an image. This includes gray level & contrast manipulation, noise
reduction, sharpening, filtering, interpolation and magnification, pseudo coloring, and so on.
Image enhancement uses qualitative subjective approach to produce a more visually
pleasing image. Acquiring clear images in underwater environments is an important issue in
ocean engineering.
The quality of underwater images plays a pivotal role in scientific
missions such as monitoring sea life, taking census of populations, and assessing geological
or biological environments. Capturing images underwater is challenging, mostly due to haze
caused by light that is reflected from a surface and is deflected and scattered by water
particles. Due to varying degrees of attenuation encountered by different wavelengths of
light, underwater images always dominated by a bluish tone. Light scattering and color
change result in contrast loss and color deviation in images acquired underwater. Haze is
caused by suspended particles such as sand, minerals, and plankton that exist in lakes,
oceans, and rivers.

Figure 1.1. Natural light enters from air to an underwater

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

As light reflected from objects propagates toward the camera, a portion of the light meets
these suspended particles. This in turn absorbs and scatters the light beam, as illustrated in
Fig.1. In the absence of blackbody radiation, the multi-scattering process along the course of
propagation further disperses the beam into homogeneous background light.
Natural light enters from air to an underwater scene point
Light scattering and color change can be corrected by contrast enhancement and image
dehazing techniques. In this paper the performance of image enhancement using Dark
channel prior is compared with that of Histogram equalization.
Underwater vision is one of the scientific fields of
investigation for researchers. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) and Remotely
Operated Vehicles (ROV) are usually employed to capture the data such as underwater
mines, shipwrecks, coral reefs, pipelines and telecommunication cables from the underwater
environment.

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

2.1 HISTOGRAM EQUILIZATION

Histogram equalization (HE) is popular method of contrast adjustment using the images
histogram and also enhances a given image [3]. In this method, transformation T is to be
designed in such a way that the gray value in the output is equally distributed in [0, 1]. It is
also called histogram flattening. Histogram equalization method in which histogram is
modified by spreading the gray level areas. When an image's histogram is made equal, all
pixel values of the image are redistributed so there are approximately an equal number of
pixels to each of the user specified output gray-scale classes e.g., 32, 64, and 256. Contrast
is increased at the most populated range of brightness values of the histogram. For very
bright or dark parts of the image, it automatically reduces the contrast associated with the
ends of a normally distributed histogram. It can also divide pixels into different groups, if
few output values are over a wide range. But this method is effective only when the original
image has poor contrast to start with, otherwise it may degrade the image quality.

Fig 2.1: histogram equalization applied to low contrast image

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

2.2 IMAGE DEHAZING

Dehazing is the process to remove haze effects in captured images and reconstruct the
original colors of natural scenes, which will be a useful pre-processing for input images and
required for receiving high performance of the vision algorithm. However, haze removal is a
challenging problem since the degradation is spatial-variant, it depends on the unknown
scene depth. In the literature, a few approaches have been proposed by using multiple
images or additional information. For example, polarization-based methods remove the haze
effect through two or more images taken with different degrees of polarization; scene
depths are estimated from multiple images of the same scene that are captured in different
weather conditions when using depth-based methods . Although these methods may produce
impressive results, they are impractical, because the requirements cannot always be satisfied
and make them difficult to meet with real-time applications of images with changing scenes.
In order to overcome the drawback of multiple images dehazing algorithms, many
researchers focus on achieving haze removal results from a single degraded image. Tan
developed the contrast maximization technique for haze removal relied on the observations
that images with enhanced visibility have more contrast than images plagued by bad
weather. Under the assumption that the transmission and the surface shading are locally
uncorrelated, Fatal presented a method for estimating the transmission in hazy scenes. He
propose a novel priordark channel priorfor single image haze removal, which is based
on the statistics of outdoor haze-free images. Combining a haze imaging model and a soft
matting interpolation method, they can recover a high-quality haze-free image.
When one takes a picture in foggy weather
conditions, the obtained image often suffers from poor visibility. The distant objects in the
fog lose the contrasts and get blurred with their surroundings. This is because the reflected
light from these objects, before it reaches the cameras attenuated in the air and further
blended with the atmospheric light scattered by some aerosols (e.g., dust and waterdroplets). Also for this reason, the colors of these objects gets faded and become much
similar to the fog, the similarity of which depending on the distances of them to the camera.
The image dehazing is essentially an under-constrained problem.

The general principle of solving such problems is therefore to explore additional priors or

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

constraints. Following this idea, deriving an inherent boundary constraint on the scene
transmission. This constraint combined with a weighted L1 norm based contextual
regularization between neighboring pixels, is formalized into an optimization problem to
recover the unknown transmission. Dehazing method requires only a few general
assumptions and can restore a haze-free image of high quality with faithful colors and fine
edge details.

Fig2.2: The original image with fog and the present DE hazed image result

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

2.3 WCID Process

A WCID means wavelength compensation and image dehazing. WCID is an underwater
image enhancement method or technique which compensate wavelength. As discussed
above, two main causes of underwater image distortions are light scattering and color
change. Sometimes artificial light source is used to overcome insufficient lightening
problem. But it introduce additional luminance in the image. WCID is an only technique
which handles problems of light scattering, color change and artificial light source presence
simultaneously. This technique has a novel systematic approach to enhance underwater
images by dehazing algorithm. A number of underwater image processing techniques used
to remove light scattering and color change effect. Generally most of the processing
techniques focus on removing either light scattering effect or color change effect. The only
technique called WCID will handle these problems simultaneously.

Fig 2.3: image formation model

A WCID is based on an underwater image formation. the algorithm for wavelength

compensation and image dehazing combines techniques to remove distortion caused by
light scattering and color change .First ,Dark channel prior method is used to estimate
distance between camera and object .based on the depth map derived ,the foreground and
background areas are segmented .the light intensities of foreground and background are
compared to determine presence of artificial light .if artificial light source is detected ,the
luminance introduced by it is removed from the foreground area. Next dehazing algorithm is
used to remove haze effect and color change.

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

Fig 2.4: WCID flow diagram

Fig 5 shows WCID flow diagram. It shows how WCID algorithm will work. The WCID
algorithm combines techniques of WCID to remove distortions caused by light scattering
and color change. Dark channel prior, an existing scene depth method is used to estimate
distance between object and camera. Based on depth map derived, the foreground and
background areas within the image are segmented. The intensities of foreground and
background then compared to determine whether there is presence of artificial light. If
artificial light source is detected, then luminance which is contributed by artificial is
removed to avoid overcompensation. Then the dehazing algorithm and wavelength
compensation are utilized to remove color change effect. The residual energy among
different color channels is used to estimate water depth. Following steps are required in
WCID algorithm.

Step 1: calculation of distance between camera and object d(x)

A dark channel prior method is used to estimate d(x). The low intensities in the dark channel
are due to shadows, colorful objects and dark objects. Depth map required two images for
parallax. Generally haze increases as distance increase. The dark channel prior method is
based on the observation that in most of the non-background light patches; at least one color
channel has a very low intensity at some pixels.

DEPT.OF ECE

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

Step 2: Removal of artificial light source

Sometimes artificial light sources are used in underwater photography for obtaining clear
image. This light source contributed additional luminance which must be deducted to avoid
overcompensation. For this, we compare foreground and background luminance and then
compare this luminances to remove luminance contributed by artificial light source.

Step 3: Calculation of underwater depth (D)

In WCID algorithm, underwater depth is calculated by comparing energy for channels. For
above water surface, energy is same for red, green and blue channels. But for below water
surface energy of color channels depends on their attenuation.

Step 4: calculation of image depth range (R)

When light penetrates through water covering the depth range R, a disparate amount of color
change will be induced at the top and at the bottom of the image. This phenomenon
necessitates varying energy compensation adjusted according to the depth of each
underwater point to correctly rectify color change.

DEPT.OF ECE

10

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

3. DARK CHANNEL PRIOR

Dark channel prior method can produce a natural haze free image. However, because this
approach is based on a statistically independent assumption in a local patch, it requires the
independent components varying significantly. Any lack of variation or low signal-to-noise
ratio (e.g., in dense haze region) will make the statistics unreliable. Moreover, as the
statistics is based on color information, it is invalid for grayscale images and difficult to
handle dense haze which is often colorless and prone to noise [4]. Main contributions of
dark channel method as follows: 1) The Separating an image into diffuse and specular
components is an ill-posed problem due to lack of observations. 2) The observed color of an
image is formed from the spectral energy distributions of the light reflected by the surface
reflectance, and the intensity of the color is determined by the imaging geometry. 3) The
dark channel is taken from the lowest intensity value among RGB channels at each pixel.
The DCP approach is able to handle distant objects even in the heavy haze image.
It does not rely on significant variance on transmission or surface shading in the input
image. The result contains few halo artifacts. Like any approach using a strong assumption,
our approach also has its own limitation. The dark channel prior may be invalid when the
scene object is inherently similar to the air light over a large local region and no shadow is
cast on the object. The complete dehazing procedure is summarized in Algorithm 1 as
shown in fig 2.
Algorithm 1: Underwater Image Haze and Noise Removal via Dark Channel Followed by
Dehazing.
1. Estimate I by Color models contrast variation in input image Y
2. Estimate transmission, t, and atmospheric light (a) at infinity. (e.g. dark channel prior)
from I
3. Dehaze I through inversion of Eq. (1) to obtain the restored image: the scene radiance
estimate R (e.g. dark channel prior) from I.

DEPT.OF ECE

11

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

A. Color Feature Extraction

A color image is a combination of some basic colors. In each individual pixel of
a color image (termed true color) down into Red, Green and Blue values. We are going to
get as a result, for the entire image is 3 matrices, each one representing color features. The
three matrices are arranging in sequential order, next to each other creating a 3 dimensional
m by n by 3 matrixes.
1) Three color planes namely Red, Green and Blue are separated.
2) for each plane row mean and column mean of colors are calculated.
3) The average of all row means and all columns means are calculated for each color plane.
4) The features of all 3 planes are combined to form a feature vector. Once the feature
vectors are generated for all images in the database, they are stored in a feature data set.

B. Estimating the Light Source of Illumination

The underwater image color constancy algorithms are based on simplifying assumptions
such as restricted (limited number of image colors which can be observed under a specific
illuminant), the distribution of colors that are present in an image (e.g. white patch) and the
set of possible light sources. The dimensions should be Px3, where P is the number of data
points and 3 is the number of color channels.
To estimate the color of the light source to compute the canonical ranges for the light
illumination type (i.e., pixels, Edges and Gradient). For accurate performance, the canonical
range must be learned using images that are a representative set of real-world surfaces. Also,
all images that are used to learn the canonical range must be images that are illuminated by
the same light source. To take illumination from all directions into account, let us consider
an infinitesimal patch of extended light source of an image.
The Color transmission algorithm is based on the average reflectance in a scene under a
neutral light source is achromatic. In these two algorithms are proven to be important
instantiations of the Murkowski-norm.

Lc (P) = ( Fcp (x) dx ) 1/p = KEc

Where c = {R, G, B} and k is a multiplicative constant chosen such that the illuminant color,
e = (eR, eG, eB) T.

DEPT.OF ECE

12

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

C. Dark channel estimation

The dark channel prior is based on the following observation on haze-free outdoor images:
in most of the non-sky patches, at least one color channel has very low intensity at some
pixels. In other words, the minimum intensity in such a patch should have a very low value.
Formally, for an image I, we define

Where Ic is a color channel of I and (x) is a local patch centered at x. our observation
says that except for the water color region the intensity of I dark is low, and tends to be zero,
if I is the haze free underwater image.
The low intensities in the dark channel are mainly due to three factors:
a) Shadows. e.g., the shadows of leaves, trees and rocks in landscape images.
b) Colorful objects or surfaces. e.g., any object (for example, green grass/tree/plant, red or
yellow flower/leaf, and blue water surface) lacking color in any color channel will result in
low values in the dark channel.
c) Dark objects or surfaces. e.g., dark tree trunk and stone. As the natural outdoor images
are usually full of shadows and colorful, the dark channels of these images are dark.

DEPT.OF ECE

13

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

D.Haze removal
The dark channel prior relies on sample minima; it is especially sensitive to outliers [9].
Various approaches can be taken to robustly estimate the dark channel, and by extension the
transmission map, considering the presence of noise. The hazy image prior to performing
the dehazing process is a natural approach to handling the problem of noise in underwater
scene radiance recovery.
In our restoration scheme, dehazing as a pre-processing step is
especially convenient considering that it is already necessary for estimating the atmospheric
light and transmission map. In the dehazing step, we can treat our image model as: Y = I +
n, with the task being only to estimate I, which encapsulates the hazy image. After the hazy
image is dehazed, the rest of the dehazing process is exactly the same as in the noise-free
case.

Fig 3.1: Flow Chart of Dehazing Process

DEPT.OF ECE

14

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The performance of the dark channel algorithm is evaluated for underwater images. and
videos downloaded from youtube. Results demonstrate haze removing of the dark channel
prior algorithm over histogram equalization. Fig.3 and Fig.4 shows the result after
processing with a dark channel prior algorithm and histogram equalization. Performance
evaluation of both dark channel prior and histogram equalization is shown in Table 1.

fig4.1: (A) underwater image-enhanced image using (b) dark prior channel
(c) Histogram equalization

DEPT.OF ECE

15

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

Comparison between the dark prior channel and the histogram equalization is shown in the
table below. This table shows the quantitative performance analysis of dark prior channel
over histogram equalization.

PSNR
Underwater image1
Dark Channel Prior
Histogram Equalization

Underwater
image2

50.4035dB

48.7065dB

25.3084dB

22.2872dB

TABLE4.1: QUANTITATIVE PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

DEPT.OF ECE

16

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

CONCLUSION
The Dehazing algorithm effectively restore image color balance and remove haze over
histogram equalization. No existing techniques can handle light scattering and color change
distortions suffered by underwater images simultaneously. The experimental results
demonstrate superior haze removing and color balancing capabilities of the DCP algorithm
over traditional Dehazing and color methods. However, the salinity and the amount of
suspended particles in ocean water vary with time, location, and season, making accurate
measurement of the rate of light energy loss is difficult. Errors in the rate of light energy loss
will affect the precision of both the water depth and the underwater propagation distance. A
very simple but powerful prior is called dark channel prior, for underwater image haze
removal. The dark channel prior is based on the statistics of the underwater images.
Applying the prior into the haze imaging model, haze can be effectively removed. Though,
haze can be removed effectively in this paper, color change distortion still exist in the
underwater image. Wavelength compensation of enhancement technique to be used for color
change distortion in future.

DEPT.OF ECE

17

CUCEK

Underwater Image Enhancement

SEPTEMBER 2015

REFERENCES
[1]. K. Lebart, C. Smith, E. Trucco, and D. M. Lane, Automatic indexing of underwater
survey video: algorithm and benchmarking method, IEEE J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 28, no. 4, pp.
673686, Oct. 2003.
[2]. Prabhakar C.J.1*, Praveen Kumar P.U, An Image Based Technique for Enhancement
of Underwater mages , December 09, 2011
[3]. J. R. Zaneveld and W. Pegau, Robust underwater visibility parameter, Opt. Exp., vol.
11, no. 23, pp. 29973009, 2003.
[4]. E. Trucco and A. T. Olmos-Antillon, Self-tuning underwater image restoration, IEEE
J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 511519, Apr. 2006.
[5]. J. S. Jaffe, Computer modeling and the design of optimal underwater imaging
systems, IEEE J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 101111, Apr. 1990.
[6]. M. C.W. van Rossum and T. M. Nieuwenhuizen, Multiple scattering of classical
waves: Microscopy, mesoscopy and diffusion, Rev. Modern Phys., vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 313
371, Jan. 1999.
[7]. Y. Y. Schechner and N. Karpel, Recovery of underwater visibility and structure by
polarization analysis, IEEE J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 570587, Jul. 2005.
[8]. I. Vasilescu, C. Detwiler, and D. Rus, Color-accurate underwater imaging using
perceptual adaptive illumination, in Proc. Robot. Sci. Syst., Zaragoza, Spain, 2010.
[9]. K. He, J. Sun, and X. Tang, Single image haze removal using Dark Channel Prior, in
Proc.IEEE CVPR, 2009, vol. 1, pp. 19561963.

DEPT.OF ECE

18

CUCEK